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Records of Civilization 

SOURCES AND STUDIES 

EDITED BY 

JAMES T. SHOTWELL, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




Ncto g0tk 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1922 



RECORDS OF CIVILIZATION 
SOURCES AND STUDIES 

Edited by 
JAMES T. SHOTWELL 



A series of volumes containing documents in translation, com- 
mentaries and interpretations, and bibliographical guides. 

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED 
Hellenic Civilization. By G. W. Botsford, Professor of History, 
Columbia University, and E. G. Sihler, Professor of the Latin. 
Language and Literature, New York University. 8vo, cloth, 
pp. 719. $4.00 net. 

History of the Franks, by Gregory Bishop of Tours. Selections, 
translated with notes. By Ernest Brehaut, Ph.D. 8vo, cloth, 
pp. XXV + 284. Map. $3.00 net. 

The Book of the Popes. (Liber Pontificalis.) Translated with 
an introduction. By Louise Ropes Loomis, Ph.D. 8vo, cloth, 
pp. xxii + 169. $2.50 net. 

For titles of volumes in preparation, see list at end of this volume. 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Columbia University New York City 

London: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
Amen Corner, E.C. 

Shanghai: EDWARD EVANS AND SONS, Ltd. 
30 North Szechuen Road 



IRecorbs ot Civilisation: Sources an& StuMes 



AN INTRODUCTION 

TO THE 

HISTORY OF HISTORY 



BY 



JAMES T. SHOTWELL, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1922 

All rights reserved 



^K 

^^i> 



Copyright, 1922, 
By COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1933. 



yoitooati 9tM« 

J. 8, Cuahing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, M»88., U.S.A. 



MAY 10 1922 

©C!.A661593 









7o 



PREFACE 

The series of which this volume forms part was planned before 
the war. Its purpose was twofold : in the first place, to make ac- 
cessible in English those sources of the history of Europe which are 
of prime importance for understanding the development of western 
civilization ; in the second place, to indicate some of the more sig- 
nificant results of scholarship in the field covered. It was intended 
to supply, to those who could not read the documents in the origi- 
nal, the means for forming some idea of the problems of the his- 
torian. About twenty volumes had been arranged for, covering a 
considerable diversity of topics, but bearing in one way or another 
upon the main purpose of the series, when with the entry of the 
United States into the war the Editor was called into Government 
service which lasted through the Peace Conference. Work upon 
the series was therefore interrupted, with the result that only three 
volumes have been published as yet : a general, comprehensive 
source-book for Greek social history, Hellenic Civilization by 
Professors Botsford and Sihler; and two volumes of a different 
type, each dealing with but a single source, — Gregory of Tours' 
History of the Franks by Dr. Brehaut, and The Book of the Popes 
{Liber Pontificalis) by Dr. Loomis. 

With the close of the war, plans for continuing the series were 
again taken up, but with modifications imposed by changed condi- 
tions. Without entering into details as to the way those condi- 
tions have affected contributors and publishers, it may be said that 
in general it has been necessary to lessen the purely documentary 
matter in the series wherever it was otherwise readily accessible, 
and to enlarge the scope of the "studies" which had been a some- 
what secondary element in the original plan. This modification, 
however, did not affect the essential purpose of the series; for it 
had never been the object to present merely revised translations of 
texts already easily available in Enghsh, valuable as that service 
might be. Its aim had been rather to fill certain gaps in the equip- 
ment of the average American student of history, and those gaps 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

exist as frequently in the field of critical interpretation as in the 
knowledge of the texts themselves. Even where the text is already 
at hand, therefore, the student's problem is not necessarily solved ; 
for modem scholarship may have suggested new and unsuspected 
meanings. In such instances the new editorial plan is to shorten 
the text to mere illustrative extracts and to concentrate upon de- 
scriptive or critical comment. In this way it is hoped to reduce the 
bulk of the volumes, while opening up in a freer way than formerly 
the significance of the sources with which they deal. In other in- 
stances, however, where the text itself is the chief contribution, 
the original method of publication will be maintained as far as pos- 
sible. This involves a certain inconsistency in the treatment of 
text and comment, since, in volumes like the present one, the elim- 
ination of a purely textual section has thrown many illustrative 
extracts into an introduction — now become the body of the book 
Even this lessened plan, however, could not have been realized but 
for the generous support of the Trustees of Columbia University. 



The present volume needs an especial word of explanation and 
apology. It has grown out of an introduction to a proposed col- 
lection of texts from mediaeval and modern historians. Nothing 
could have been farther from the original intention of the author 
than to write a history of antique historiography, which the book 
now in part resembles. But the absence of any satisfactory general 
survey covering the antique field led to enlargement in scope and 
critical comment, until the work assumed the present form. It is 
freely recognized that the field covered belongs of right to the an- 
cient historian, properly equipped not only with the classics and the 
languages of Western Asia but also with archaeology and its asso- 
ciated sciences. If any such had done the work, this volume 
would have remained the single chapter originally planned ; so the 
classicist, who will undoubtedly detect in it the intrusion of an out- 
sider, is at least partly to blame for the adventure, since it was the 
absence of a guide such as he might have offered which led to the 
preparation of this one. 

However much of an adventure this is in itself, the circum- 
stances under which the volume was made ready for the press have 



PREFACE ix 

made it all the more perilous from the standpoint of scholarship. 
For it has been prepared at odd moments, as occasion offered, in 
the midst of other work of an entirely different kind and involving 
heavy responsibilities. Part of it has been written during Euro- 
pean travel with only such books at hand as could be obtained in 
local libraries or could be carried along; part of it is drawn from 
fragments of old university lectures; and part was already pre- 
pared for a mere introduction to source selections. This will ex- 
plain, if it does not excuse, some irregularities in treatment, and 
inadequacies in the bibliographical notes, as well as the use in most 
instances of available translations of extracts. Had there been any 
possibility of a separate and lengthy series of illustrative transla- 
tions, as was originally planned, these extracts would not have ap- 
peared in the Introduction. Generally, however, a little examina- 
tion will reveal something like a substitute for the bibliographies in 
the footnotes, or in a reference to some comprehensive manual which 
is the inevitable starting point for further work in any case. If, 
however, this Introduction to the exacting disciplines of history 
has itself escaped some of the many pitfalls which lie along the 
pathway it follows, its good fortune is due in the first instance to 
the fact that the pathway is, upon the whole, not an obscure one, 
but travelled by many, who, however, go only part way or turn off 
in different directions. But in the second place, it is due to the 
critical care and scholarly oversight which has been given the en- 
tire apparatus of the book by Miss Isabel McKenzie, formerly of 
the History Department of Barnard College. 

J. T. S. 

COLXJMBIA UniVEBSITX, 

April, 192 1. 





Preface 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

vii 



CHAPTER 

I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 



SECTION I 
INTRODUCTION 

Definition and Scope of History 
Prehistory; Myth and Legend 
Books and Writing . . . 
The Measuring of Time 

Egyptian Annals 

Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian Records 



I 

12 
28 
40 

SI 
66 



SECTION II 
JEWISH HISTORY 

VII. The Old Testament as History 79 

VIII. The Pentateuch 86 

IX. The Remaining Historical Books of the Old Testa- 
ment g6 

X. The Formation of the Canon 108 

XI. Non-Biblical Literature; Josephus . . . .114 



SECTION III 
GREEK HISTORY 

XII. From Homer to Herodotus 128 

XIII. Herodotus 144 

XIV. Thucydides 162 

XV. Rhetoric and Scholarship 179 

XVI. PoLYBius 191 

XVII. Later Greek Historians 202 

zi 



xii CONTENTS 

SECTION IV 
ROMAN HISTORY 

XVIII. History at Rome ; Oratory and Poetry . . . .211 

XIX. RoBiAN Annalists and Early Historians . . . .225 

XX, Varro, Cksar and Sallust 236 

XXI. LiVY 247 

XXII. Tacitus 257 

XXIII. From Suetonius to Ammianus Marcelunus . . .273 

SECTION V 
CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 

XXIV. The New Era 278 

XXV. Allegory and the Contribution of Origen . . . 289 

XXVI. Chronology and Church History; Eusebius . . . 300 

POSTSCRIPT ON 
MEDLEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY 

XXVII. The Interpretation of History 314 

Index 335 




THE PALERMO STONE 
(See page 55) 



SECTION I 
INTRODUCTION 

CHAPTER I 
DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY 

Until recently, history itself has lacked historians. There have 
been histories of almost everything else under the sun, of literature, 
philosophy, the arts and sciences, and, above all, of politics. But 
until the last few years, — with the exception of a few works for 
students, — the story of history has remained unwritten. Clio, 
though the oldest of the Muses, has been busy recording the past of 
others but has neglected her own ; and apparently her readers 
have seldom inquired of her about it. For even yet the phrase 
"history of History" conveys but little meaning to most people's 
minds, seeming to suggest some superfluous academic problem for 
which a busy world should afford no time, rather than what it really 
is, that part of the human story which one should master first if 
one would ever learn to judge the value of the rest. 

The prime reason for this state of affairs is probably that which 
has just been hinted at. Clio was a Muse ; history has generally 
been regarded as a branch of literature. Historians have been 
treated as masters of style or of the creative imagination, to be 
ranked alongside poets or dramatists, rather than simply as his- 
torians, with an art and science of their own. Thucydides has been 
read for his Greek, Livy for his Latin. Carlyle ranks in book-lists 
with the word-painter Ruskin. Now and again historical criticisms 
of the "great masters" have appeared, and scholarly studies of 
limited fields. But so long as history could be viewed as primarily 
a part of literature its own history could not be written ; for the 
recovery of the past is a science as well as an art. 

The history of History, therefore, had to await the rise of scien- 
tific historical criticism before it attracted the attention of even his- 



2 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

torians themselves. That has meant, as a matter of course, that 
not many except the critics have been attracted by it. Masked 
under the unlovely title Historiography, it has recently become 
a formal part of the discipHne of historical seminars, but, with few 
exceptions, such manuals as there are have been mainly contribu- 
tions to the apparatus of research. They have, therefore, lacked 
the allurements of style and often even of imaginative appeal which 
win readers for history ; and few but the students have known of 
their existence. 

And yet the history of History demands rather than invites at- 
tention. Art, science and philosophy combined, history is the old- 
est and vastest of the interests of mankind. What was the past to 
Babylon or Rome ? When and how was Time first discovered, and 
the shadowy past marked out by numbered years? What travel- 
ling Greeks first brought home that knowledge of the dim antiquities 
of Egypt and the East which made them critics of their own Homeric 
legends and so created history? What havoc was wrought in 
scientific inquiry by religious revelations and in revelations by 
scientific inquiry ? By what miracle has the long lost past been at 
last recovered, in our own day, so that we are checking up Herodotus 
by his own antiquity, correcting the narrative of Livy or Tacitus 
by the very refuse deposited beneath the streets upon which they 
walked? This is more than romance or literature, though the 
romance is there to the full. For the history of History is the 
story of that deepening memory and scientific curiosity which is 
the measure of our social consciousness and our intellectual life. 

But we must first get our bearings. For the word "history" 
has two meanings.^ It may mean either the record of events or 
events themselves. We call Cromwell a "maker of history" 

' C/. E. Bemheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und dcr Geschichtsphilosophie 
(Sth and 6th ed., 1914), Chap. I. The German word " Geschichte," meaning that 
which has happened (was geschieht, was geschehen ist), is even more misleading. 
R. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History . . . (1894), (p. 5) called attention to the 
ambiguity of the term in English, but limits his distinction to the twofold one of 
objective and subjective history, as substantially in the text above. Bemheim 
insists (Chap. I, Sect. 5), upon introducing a third category — the knowledge or 
study of history, which is neither the events nor their artistic presentation but the 
science of research (Geschichtswissenschaft). There is a suggestive anthology of 
definitions in F. J. Teggart's Prolegomena to History (1916), Part III, Sect. i. 



DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY 3 

although he never wrote a Ime of it. We even say that the historian 
merely records the history which kings and statesmen produce. 
History in such instances is obviously not the narrative but the 
thing that awaits narration. The same name is given to both the 
object of the study and to the study itself. The confusion is un- 
fortunate. Sociology, we know, deals with society; biology with 
life ; but history deals with history ! It is like juggling with words. 

Of the two meanings, the larger one is comparatively recent. 
The idea that events and people are historic by reason of any quality 
of their own, even if no one has studied or written upon them, did 
not occur to the ancients. To them history was the other thing 
— the inquiry and statement, not the thing to be studied or re- 
corded. It was not until modern times that the phenomena them- 
selves were termed history. The history of a people originally 
meant the research and narrative of a historian, not the evolution 
of the nation. It meant a work dealing with the subject, not the 
subject itself. And this is logically as well as historically the more 
accurate use of the word. Things are never historic in themselves. 
They can be perpetuated out of the dead past only in two ways : 
either as part of the ever-moving present, — as institutions, art, 
science, etc., — things timeless or universal; or in that imaginative 
reconstruction which it is the special office of the historian to provide: 

This distinction must be insisted upon if we are to have any 
clear thinking upon the history of History. For obviously in this 
phrase we are using ''history" only in its original and more limited 
meaning. We are dealing with historians, their methods, their 
tools and their problems ; not with the so-called "makers of history " 
except as materials for the historian, — not with battles and con- 
stitutions and " historical " events, in and for themselves, but only 
where the historian has treated them. And it is his treatment 
rather than the events themselves which mainly interests us. 

A word first, however, upon history in the wider, looser sense of 
"what has happened." Does it include all that has happened? 
If so, it includes everything; for the whole universe, as modern 
science shows, is in process of eternal change. It extends beyond 
the phenomena of life into those of matter ; for that vast story of 
evolution from amoeba and shell-fish to man, whose outlines we are 



4 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

learning to decipher from the pages of stratified rock, is but one 
incident in the whole. The rocks themselves have ''happened" 
like the life whose traces they preserve. In short, if history includes 
all that has happened, it was under way not less when the first 
stars took their shape, than it was when about a century ago 
science began to decipher and read it. 

The deciphering of such history, however, is not the task of 
the historian but of the natural scientist. There is no harm, to 
be sure, in considering the analysis of matter as a branch of history 
when it reveals the chemical elements which have gone into the 
upbuilding of phenomena or the electron which is probably respon- 
sible for the element. But this is not the historian's kind of history. 
Faced with such conceptions, he realizes that he must content him- 
self with what is scarcely more than an infinitesimal fraction of the 
vast field of knowledge. And yet it is good for him to realize his 
place in that great fellowship which is today so busily at work upon 
the mystery of the processes of nature. For, once he has had the 
vision of the process itself, he can never face the old tasks in the 
same way. It transforms his perspectives, gives him different 
sets of values and reconstructs that synthesis of life and the world 
into which he fits the work of his own research. Although he 
realizes the partial nature of his outlook, yet it is not rendered 
invalid. On the contrary it acquires a greater validity if it is 
fitted into the vaster scheme. The significance of his work grows 
rather than lessens, in the light of the wider horizon. The per- 
spectives of science are an inspiration for the historian, even while 
he recognizes that he can never master its original sources or trace 
its history. That is for the scientists to deal with. And, as the 
nature of their phenomena becomes clearer to them, they are be- 
coming, themselves, more and more historical. The larger his- 
torical aspects of physics and chemistry, to which we have just 
alluded, are taken over by the astronomer, while "natural history" 
in the good old meaning of that term is the especial province of the 
geologist and biologist. Between them and historians the con- 
nection is becoming direct and strong ; and there is much to be 
said for the claim that, both through his work and his influence, the 
greatest of all historians was Darwin. 

But if History in the objective sense is not all that has happened, 



DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY 5 

kow much is it of what has happened ? The answer to this has gen- 
erally depended upon the point of view of individual historians. All 
are agreed, for instance, that the term " history " should be limited 
to substantially human affairs. And yet it cannot be narrowly 
so defined, for the body and mind of man belong to the animal 
world and have antecedents that reach far beyond the confines of 
humanity, while the natural environment of life, — food, chmate, 
shelter, etc., — are also part of the human story. When we try 
still further to limit the term to some single line of human activity, 
as for instance, politics, we shut out fields in which the expression 
of the human spirit has often been more significant, the fields of 
culture and ideas, of hterature, art, engineering, education, science 
or philosophy. Why not, therefore, avoid trouble by admitting 
the whole field of the human past as history ? 

There seems to be just one qualification necessary: it must 
be that past viewed historically, which means that the data must 
be viewed as part of the process of social development, not as 
isolated facts. For historical facts are those which form a part of 
that great stream of interrelation which is Time. 

This is still history in the objective sense, the field which the 
historian may call his own. But a careful reading of our definition 
shows that we have already passed over into a consideration of 
history in the truer meaning of the word — the performance of the 
historian; since it is the attitude assumed toward the fact which 
finally determines whether it is to be considered as historical or not. 
Now what, in a word, is this historical attitude? It consists, as we 
have already intimated, in seeing things in their relation to others, 
both in Space and in Time. Biography, for instance, becomes 
history when it considers the individual in his setting in society; 
it is not history in so far as it deals exclusively with a single life. 
It may deal with the hero as an isolated, solitary figure or as a type 
common to all times. In either case it lacks the historical point 
of view, for it is only by connecting the individual with his own 
society that he enters into that great general current of events 
which we call Time. The study of any farmer's life, as a farmer's 
life, set in the unending routine of the seasons is almost as timeless 
as the study of Shakespeare's mind. The New England farmer, 
on the other hand, and the Elizabethan Shakespeare enter the field 



6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

of history because they are considered in their setting in society ; 
and society is the reservoir of time, the ever-changing, ever-enduring 
reflex of human events. 

The same tests that apply to biography apply to antiquarian 
research. Because an event belongs to the past it is not neces- 
sarily historical. Indeed in so far as the antiquarian isolates his 
material for our inspection, interested in it for its own sake, laying it 
out like the curator of a museum, he robs it of its historical char- 
acter. For the facts of history do not exist by themselves any 
more than the lives of historical personages. They are parts of a 
process and acquire meaning only when seen in action. The anti- 
quarian preserves the fragments of the great machinery of events, 
but the historian sets it to work again, however faintly the sound 
of its motion comes to him across the distant centuries.^ 
V History in the proper sense of the word began with the Greeks. 
They had already surpassed the world in the purely art creation of 
the epic, where the imagination urging the laggard movement of 
events secures the dynamism of the past which is the first condi- 
tion of history. Then they turned from poetry to prose, and in 
sobriety and self-restraint began to criticise their own legends, 
to see if they were true. Before the sixth century B.C., so far as we 
know, no critical hand had attempted to sort out the data of the 
past, impelled by the will to disbelieve. This revolutionary mood, 
as happy in finding what had not happened as what had, marks 
the emergence of the scientific spirit into the great art of story- 
telling. History in the true sense is the combination of the two. 

The word ''history" ^ itself comes to us from these sixth century 
lonians and is the name they gave to their achievement. It meant, 
not the telling of a tale, but the search for knowledge and the truth. 

^ It will be seen that this conception is practically identical with that which Bem- 
beim develops with such care in his manual, p. 9. His definition of history, in this 
subjective sense of the word, runs as follows : 

*' Die Geschichtswissenschaft ist die Wissenschaf t, welche die zeitlich und raumlich 
bestimmten Tatsachen der Entwicklung der Menschen in ihren (singularen wie 
typischen und koUektiven) Betatigungen als soziale Wesen im Zusammenhange 
psycho-physicher Kausalitat erforscht und darstellt." 

The expression " Kausalitat " he explains later in quite a Bergsonian sense. It 
is not mechanistic. Cf. Chap. I, Sect. 4, pp. loi sqq. A study of Bergson's conception 
of Time would help to elucidate Bernheim and to elaborate the idea of the text above. 

* Ionic IffTopLt], Attic laropia. {Vide infra, p. 135.) 



DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY 7 

It was to them much what philosophy was to the later Athenians 
or science to us.^ The historian was the critical inquirer. Herod- 
otus was as much an investigator and explorer as a reciter of narra- 
tive, and his life-long investigation was "history" in his Ionian 
speech.^ Yet Herodotus himself hints that the word may also be 
applied to the story which the research has made possible,^ not to 
the guileless tale of the uncritical, to be sure, but to a narrative 
such as he and his soberly inquisitive fellows could tell. It was 
not until Aristotle,^ and more especially Polybius,^ that we have it 
definitely applied to the literary product instead of to the inquiry 
which precedes it. From Polybius to modern times, history (Latin, 
historia) has been literature. It is a strange but happy coinci- 
dence, that when the scientific investigator of today turns from 
literature to scholarship, from writing books to discovering facts, 
he is turning not away from but towards the field of history as the 
word was understood by those forerunners of Herodotus to whom 
science was as yet but a dream and an aspiration.^ 

This double aspect of history — the one no older than Ionia, 
the other reaching back to the dawn of Time — has apparently 
puzzled a good many who write about it. There are those who try 
to prove that history is either a science or an art, when, as a matter of 
fact, it contains the elements of both. We shall recur to this in a 
later section, where we shall have to face the further question of the 
relation of art to science in general. But without entering into 
that problem yet, we may for the present, with a view to clarity, 
frankly divide our subject into two : the research which is science 
and the narration which is art. 

The history of these two divisions runs in different channels, 

^Cf. Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1912), p. 123. 

* Cf. the opening sentence, "This is the setting forth of the researches of Herodotus 
of Halicamassus," etc. ' Cf. Bk. VII, Chap. XCVI. 

* Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. I, Chap. IV, Sect. 8 {cf. note in E. M. Cope and 
J. E. Sandys' edition) and Sect. 13 ; Poetry, Chap. IX. 

6 Cf. Polybius, The Histories, Bk. I, Chap. III. 

* The achievement of the Hebrew historians was primarily in the field of art. Al- 
though sections of the early records of the Jews are the finest narrative we possess 
from so early a date, — far earlier than any similar product in Greece, — the prin- 
ciples of criticism which determined the text were not what we should call scientific. 
They were not sufficiently objective. (Vide infra, p. 79.) 



8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

and has always done so. History, the art, flourishes with the arts. 
It is mainly the creature of imagination and literary style. It 
depends upon expression, upon vivid painting, sympathy, grace 
and elegance, elevated sentiments or torrential power. The 
picture may be partial or incorrect — like Carlyle's description of 
revolutionary France; sympathies may warp the truth, as in 
Froude's Henry VIII or Macaulay's History of England; elegance 
of style may carry even Gibbon beyond the data in his sources, and 
the passionate eloquence of Michelet ride down the restrictions 
of sober fact. But in the art of history-narration these are magnifi- 
cent even if they are not true. Indeed the art in history seems to 
run, with most perverse intent, in the opposite direction to the 
science. Wherever the great masters of style have dominated, 
there one is likely to find less interest in criticising sources than 
in securing effects. The historian's method of investigation often 
seems to weaken in proportion as his rhetoric improves. This is 
not always true, but it is sufficiently common to make the scien- 
tific historian eternally distrustful of the literary. The distrust 
in the long run has its sobering effect upon the hterary historian, 
in spite of his contemptuous references to the researcher as a dry- 
as-dust who lacks insight, the first qualification of the historian. 
And from the standpoint of supreme historical achievement both 
criticisms are justified. The master of research is generally but a 
poor artist, and his uncolored picture of the past will never rank in 
literature beside the splendid distortions which glow in the pages 
of a Michelet or a Macaulay, simply because he lacks the human 
sympathy which vitalizes the historical imagination. The diffi- 
culty, however, in dealing with the art in history is that, being 
largely conditioned upon genius, it has no single, traceable line of 
development. Here the product of the age of Pericles remains 
unsurpassed still ; the works of Herodotus and Thucydides standing 
like the Parthenon itself, — models for all time. 

On the other hand, history, the science, has a development and 
logical history of its own. Paralleling other scientific work, it has 
come to the front in our own age, so that it has not only gained 
recognition among historians as a distinct subject, but by the 
results of its obscure and patient labors it has recast for us almost 
the whole outline of our evolution. Impartial, — almost unhuman 



DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY 9 

in its cold impartiality, — weighing documents, accumulating 
evidence, sorting out the false wherever it can be detected, no 
matter what venerable belief goes with it, it is piecing together with 
infinite care the broken mosaic of the past, — not to teach us lessons 
nor to entertain, but simply to fulfil the imperative demand of the 
scientific spirit — to find the truth and set it forth. 

It is this scientific history — this modern fulfilment of the old 
Greek historia — which is responsible for the development of that 
group of auxiliary sciences of which archaeology is the most notable, 
by means of which the scope of history has been extended so far 
beyond the written or oral records. The advance along this line, 
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been one of the 
greatest achievements of our age. The vast gulf which separates 
the history of Egypt by Professor Breasted of Chicago from that of 
Herodotus gives but a partial measure of its achievement. By the 
mechanism now at his disposal, the scientific explorer can read more 
history from the rubbish heaps buried in the desert sand than the 
greatest traveller of antiquity could gather from the priests of 
Thebes. 

This history of scientific history, from the Greeks to our time, 
is, therefore, the central thread of our story. But a proper historical 
treatment of it must not be limited narrowly to it alone. It in- 
cludes as well the long pre-scientific and the subsequent unscientific 
achievements. All of these belong, more or less, to our subject. 
Indeed, in so far as they exhibit any clear sign of that sense of the 
interrelation of events which we have emphasized above, they are 
history, — winning their place by their art if not by their science. 
One must not omit, for instance, the work of mediaeval monks, 
although they copied impossible events into solemn annals without 
a sense of the absurdity, and although individually they are the 
last to deserve the title of artists. For they had, after all, a vision 
of the process of history, and one which was essentially artistic. 
The Christian Epic, into which they transcribed their prosy lines, 
was as genuine an art-product as the Greek or Babylonian, although 
it was one which only the composite imagination of religious faith 
could achieve. The history of History must deal with such things 
— historically. 



lo INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

The same is true of the pre-scientific origins. These lie un- 
numbered centuries beyond that comparatively modern world of 
Hecataeus and Herodotus. They reach back, indeed, to the dawn of 
memory — when, as we suppose, some descendants of those shaggy, 
simian brutes of the tertiary forests and caves, which were destined 
to produce humanity, first learned, however dimly, to distinguish 
past from present. This means that the origins of history are as 
old as mankind. For the dawn of memory was the dawn of con- 
sciousness. No other acquisition, except that of speech, was so 
fateful for humanity. Memory — the thing which binds one's life 
together, which makes me, me and you, you, which enables us to 
recognize ourselves of yesterday in ourselves of today, that repro- 
duction of the dead past thrilling once more with life and passion, 
that magic glass that holds the unfading reflection of what exists 
no more — what a miracle it is ! Destroy memory and you destroy 
time so far as you and I are concerned. The days and the years 
may pass along, each with its burden of work or its boon of rest, but 
they pass from the nothingness of the future to the nothingness of 
the past like the falling of drops of rain upon the ocean. The past 
exists in the memory as the future in the imagination. Conscious- 
ness is itself but the structure built upon this tenuous bridge be- 
tween the two eternities of the unknown, and history is the record 
of what has taken place therein. Memory, in short, reveals the 
world as a process, and so makes its data historical. 

At first glance it might seem absurd to carry our origins back so 
far. We have been used to thinking of early history as a thing 
of poetry and romance, born of myth and embodied in epic. It 
demands a flight of the imagination to begin it not with rhythmic 
and glowing verse but almost with the dawn of speech. But the 
origins of history begin back yonder, with the very beginning of 
mankind, before the glaciers swept our valleys to the sea, instead 
of by the camp-fires of Aryan warriors or in the clamorous square 
of the ancient city. When men first learned to ask — or tell — in 
grunts and signs "what happened," history became inevitable. 
And from that dim, far-off event until the present, its data have 
included all that has flashed upon the consciousness of men so as to 
leave its reflection or burn in its scar. Its threads have been broken, 
tangled and lost. Its pattern cannot be deciphered beyond a few 



DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF HISTORY ii 

thousand years, for, at first, the shuttle of Time tore as it wove the 
fabric of social life, and we can only guess by the rents and gashes 
what forces were at work upon it. What we do know, however, is 
that although history itself in the true sense of the term did not 
start until midway down the process of social evolution, when the 
social memory was already continuous, when deeds were inscribed 
on monuments, and the critical spirit was at work, — in short when 
civilization had begun, — still the prehistoric history is of more 
than mere speculative interest; for civilization continued the 
pattern begun for it, and anthropology has shown us how absurd 
has been our interpretation of what civilized man has been thinking 
and doing, so long as we have ignored his uncivilized, ancestral 
training. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

For the general treatment of the problems of the historian, see Ernst 
Bernheim, Lehrbuch der hislorischen Methode und der Geschichisphilosophie 
(Sth and 6th ed., 1914) ; C. V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction to the 
Study of History (tr. 1898) and C. V. Langlois, Mantiel de bibliographie his- 
torique (2d ed., 1901-1904). The sketch of the general subject in the article 
History in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica was the 
starting point for this study. It would be well, however, to read first The 
New History (191 2), by James Harvey Robinson. 

For ancient history in general an important manual is that of C. Wachs- 
muth, Einleitung in das Studium der alten Geschichte (1895). For' mediaeval 
historiography such works as W. Wattenbach's Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen 
im Mittelalter (2 vols., 6th ed., 1 893-1 894) or A. Molinier's Les sources de 
I'histoire de France (6 vols., 1901-1906), are adequate in their respective fields. 
No similar survey exists of English mediaeval historians. For the modem 
field E. Fueter's Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (191 1, there is also a 
French edition, 1914) covers the ground from Machiavelli to about 1870, 
while such works as G. P. Gooch's History and Historians in the Nineteenth 
Century (1913), or A. Guilland's Modern Germany and Her Historians (191 5; 
the French edition appeared in 1900), deal with important topics. R. Flint's 
History of the Philosophy of History, Historical Philosophy in France and 
French Belgium and Switzerland (1894) is preceded by a short general survey. 
B. Croce's Theory and History of Historiography (translated by D. Ainslie, 1921) 
has somewhat more theory than history, but it is found stimulating by the 
philosophically inclined. For more specific references see below. 



CHAPTER II 
PREmSTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 

Although the origins of History are as old as humanity, the 
history of History reaches back to no such dim antiquity. There 
was story-telling by the camp-fires of the cave-men, before the ice- 
sheets had receded or the continents had taken their shape, when 
the Thames emptied into the Rhine and the British Channel was 
the valley of the Seine. But no trace remains of the tales that 
were told. Anthropology may surmise something of their content 
from the study of savages today ; but the history we reconstruct 
from the chipped stones and burial mounds of our prehistoric 
ancestors is our own, not theirs. It is a closing chapter, not the 
opening, of the history of History.* 

The term " prehistoric history " is, therefore, new. Once, not 
so very long ago, prehistory meant what it seems to say ; it im- 
plied in a general way that there were ages or peoples prior to those 
known to us, which were devoid of history. One did not generally 
stop to inquire whether they themselves were devoid of it or whether 
it was ourselves who were devoid of whatever history they may have 
had. In either case the main point was clear; the term was a 
general negative. Its apphcation on the other hand was definite ; 
it referred to what lay beyond the Old Testament, Herodotus and 
a few other texts from the classics. For what lay beyond them was 
an unreal world of myth and legend, vague in outhne, irrecoverable. 

In our own day all this has changed. Archaeology, pushing the 
frontiers of knowledge into that seemingly impenetrable past, has 
enlarged the field of history, both by the recovery of texts written 

^ It may not be out of place, however, to refer, for a general study of the field, to 
such manuals as H. F. Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age (1915), with good bibliography 
and illustrative material ; to W. J. SoUas, Ancient Hunters (2d ed., 1915) ; H. Obermaier, 
Der Mensch der Vorzeit (1912), and, for detailed study, the exhaustive work of J. 
D6chelette, Manuel d'archeologie prehistorique, celtique et gallo-romaine (2 vols., 
1908-1914). The prehistory of Egypt, Babylonia and the ^gean is now treated in 
the archaeological studies devoted to those special fields. 

12 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 13 

over a thousand years before the oldest texts of the Bible, and by 
its own, modern story of still more remote antiquities. Since this 
latter is the more comprehensive, — and the more important, — 
it, rather than the work of any hieroglyphic or cuneiform writer, 
is commonly taken as the measure of the field of history, and its 
farther limits as the boundaries between the historical and the pre- 
historical. Strictly taken, this would mean that those boundaries 
would shift with every new discovery of archcTology, and as the 
result would be unending confusion, it is customary now to regard 
the whole field in which the archaeologist can find any recorded 
texts as lying within the field of history. The test for the distinc- 
tion between history and prehistory is therefore the existence — 
or persistence — of inscriptions, since upon them depend the 
possibilities of history. Even where the inscriptions are not yet 
deciphered, the fact of their existence makes their field potential 
history. The implements are at hand by which, some day, the past 
from which they came shall be known ; and if at present we have 
not learned to use them, the confident movement of modern scholar- 
ship includes them in the field of history along with those already 
mastered.^ The distinction between history and prehistory has 
in it a certain flavor of anticipation as well as of achievement and 
does not always meet the facts of the case. Where this anticipa- 
tion involves too great a strain upon one's faith, it is at times dis- 
regarded ; but upon the whole it is as good a distinction as has been 
found, and the archaeologist is justifying it by works. 

The prehistoric is, therefore, to be used not so much in the sense 
of the pre-known past, — since much inside the field of history 
remains unknown and on the other hand much beyond it is known, 
— as the pre-inscriptional or pre-literary.^ This, at first sight, may 

1 In a sense the meaning has not changed so much as might seem ; for when the 
field of history did not reach beyond the Bible and Herodotus, the hieroglyphs were 
unread and the key to them supposedly lost for all time. So the oldest texts limited 
the field of history. 

* Hittite or Cretan cultures are not viewed as prehistoric although their inscrip- 
tions are still unread. The "prehistoric" element in Crete preceded all the Minoan 
eras. One may say, however, that the term " prehistory " is used upon the whole 
with something of the vagueness of the term " history." Different writers use it dif- 
ferently. Sometimes it seems to mean the history of peoples devoid of civilization, in 
particular of those in the stone age, preceding the age of metals. So, especially, in 
Egyptian histories. 



14 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

seem a very inadequate test, since inscriptions furnish even the 
literary archaeologist with only a meagre portion of the sources 
from which he pieces together his story. But in reahty it is as 
nearly decisive as anything can be. It marks the line between the 
possibilities of narratives about definite persons and the vague 
movements of peoples, — in short, the line between the particular 
and the general. But more than this, writing alone, among all the 
sources of history, preserves events. Monuments furnish only 
hints and implications of them. The stone circles of Stonehenge 
indicate that once a numerous tribe concentrated its energy upon 
a great achievement. But we do not know what tribe it was or 
what motive, religious or monumental, led to this concentration of 
energy. All we have is the achievement. Even drawings, unless 
they have some word or sign attached, do not perpetuate definite 
events. The bison drawn by the palaeolithic cave-men may be 
S5nnbols from the realm of magic or memories of the hunt, there is 
no way of knowing which. The hieroglyph, which is half-picture, 
half-writing, can arrange its succession of symbols so that by the 
addition of many, side by side, a sort of moving-picture narrative 
is told. But only writing, that mobUe medium, responsive to 
changing fact, can record motives or deal with action ; and these 
are the proper themes of history.^ 

The field of prehistory is joined with that of history by archae- 
ology, which works with impartial zeal in both, though with dif- 
ferent methods. In the prehistoric field, since the documents are 
lacking, it can only verify its conclusions by the comparison of the 
remains of the culture of unknown peoples with the output of similar 

1 The mention of the moving-picture suggests that, if the test for the distinction 
between prehistory and history is the use of writing, we may be at another boundary- 
mark today. Writing, after all, is but a poor makeshift. When one compares the 
best of writings with what they attempt to record, one sees that this instrument of 
ours for the reproduction of reality is almost palaeolithic in its crudity. It loses 
even the color and tone of living speech, as speech, in turn, reproduces but part of 
the psychic and physical complex with which it deals. We can at best sort out a few 
facts from the moving mass of events and dress them up in the imperfections of our 
riietoric, to survive as fading simulacra in the busy forum of the world. Some day 
the media in which we work today to preserve the past will be seen in all their in- 
adequacy and crudity when new implements for mirroring thought, expression and 
movement will have been acquired. Then we, too, may be numbered among the 
prehistoric. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 15 

cultures today. This is the comparative method of anthropology 
which has thus been called into service to enable us to recover 
the unrecorded past before history began. Tasmanian savages a 
generation ago or African Bushmen today illustrate the life and 
society ^f the men of the old stone age in Europe.^ Where bone 
implements are added to the primitive equipment and tools of 
the hunt become more efficient, the Esquimaux may furnish a 
clue not only as to the mode of life but even as to the mental out- 
look. So on, through varying grades of culture, the comparative 
method tests the sources of archaeology by data of anthropology. 
This is not the place to enter into a critical description of such 
a method ; but it may not be out of place, as we pass along, to repeat 
the warning which anthropologists have frequently issued, that 
there is no more treacherous method in the scientific world today 
than this use of analogies, which at first sight seems so easy. One 
should be trained in the method of anthropology before using it, 
just as one should be trained in the use of historical sources before 
writing history. In the first place, the things compared must be 
really comparable. This sounds like an absurdly elementary prin- 
ciple, and yet a vast amount of anthropological history has been 
written in disregard of it. Institutions from different tribes, which 
bear an external resemblance, have been torn from their setting, 
massed together and made the basis of sweeping generalizations as 
to the general scheme of social evolutions; and the data of the 
prehistoric world have then been interpreted in the light of inferences 

^ The frankest use of such a method in this particular field is that of W. J. SoUas 
in Ancient Hunters. 

For examples of the comparative method as applied by the earlier anthropologists, 
accompanied by a thoroughgoing criticism (by John Dewey), see W. I. Thomas, Source 
Book for Social Origins (1909), Part II {Mental Life and Education). A long bibliog- 
raphy is appended to the section. The numerous works of Franz Boas, as well as 
those of his former students, furnish both direction and example in sound methods in 
anthropology; his Anthropology (1908) has been supplemented by various studies. 
The student of history need not deal with W. Wundt's Volker psychologic (9 vols., 
1911-1919) or L. Levy-Bruhl's Les fonctions mentales dans les societSs inferieures 
(1910), although he will gain much from a criticism of the latter by A. A. Golden- 
weiser in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. XIII (1911), pp. 121-130; but he 
should at very least read R. R. Marett's little sketch of the field and method. An- 
thropology, in the Home University series (1912), while E. B. Tylor's Primitive Cul- 
ture, although first published years ago, is still as valuable as it is delightful (2 vols., 
6th ed., 1920). 



i6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

from these conclusions. Such schemes are not history but specula- 
tion ; some of them may even yet be verified by fact and turn out 
to be true. But the historian should not mistake their character. 
If his training in the historical method has amounted to anything, 
he should not lose sight of the fact that phenomena are never quite 
the same outside of their environment, for the environment is part 
of them. The significance of an institution depends not so much 
upon its existence or form as upon its use. 

However, within broad limits and used with due caution, the 
comparative method may furnish an anthropological history of the 
prehistoric world. It can suggest manners and customs and even, 
— what alone concerns us here, — a glimpse of the mental outlook 
of peoples who have kept no history of their own. For, in a general 
way, the reactions of all men in similar circumstances are alike. 
The tales they tell in Mexico resemble those of ancient Babylon. 
Heroes perform almost the same feats through the entire semi- 
savage world, varied only by the local conditions, and the mysteries 
of Olympian councils are disclosed in recognizable terms. 

Now, upon the whole, it is the case that tales are told only when 
they are worth telling, and the test as to whether they are worth 
telling or not is whether they are listened to. This furnishes us 
with a clue as to their general character, for men do not gather 
willingly to listen about commonplace things of daily routine, — 
which, so far as possible, have been turned over to the women. Just 
as the men have taken to themselves the careers of adventure, of 
war and the chase, they wish to make their tales adventures of the 
mind. This means that the universal content of all early tales is 
myth.^ For myth alone can supply enough of the element of 
surprise, of the strange and mysterious. In the world of luck and 

* The term myth is used here in the definite sense of the tale involving super- 
natural elements. It is also used in English loosely to include all legendary material. 
The instances cited in the Oxford dictionary furnish a commentary upon the unformed 
state of thinking in this field. The classic chapters on mythology in E. B. Tylor's 
Primitive Culture should be read in this connection. There are good articles in recent 
encyclopaedias and the rich field of anthropology is rapidly supplying whole libraries 
of material. A popular and worthy enterprise is the collection of thirteen volumes, 
The Mythology of All Races, edited by L. H. Gray, of which the first three volumes 
appeared in 1916. The publications of the American Bureau of Ethnology at Wash- 
ington furnish a wealth of material of great interest in this regard. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 17 

miracle, with its constant possibility of dramatic turns, the dramatis 
persoTKB are mainly supernatural. The explanation of this lies in the 
tendency of the savage to "animize" his world. Dawn and clouds, 
fire, running water, dark caves or groves, animals, queer things 
or people, whatever strikes his fancy and remains un-understood, 
is likely to become a "presence," an uncanny something that lies 
in that fearsome realm where things are lucky or unlucky in their 
own right, sacred or accursed, acting irresponsibly or, in any case, 
beyond the normal line of mere human conduct. The world is so 
full of these uncanny things that the story of even daily life among 
primitive peoples is bound to contain enough myth to condemn it 
utterly in a rationalist society. And yet it may be mainly true — 
true to the experiences of its authors and perpetuators. 

The commonest theme of such myths is that which gives the 
savage mind its greatest adventure, the myth of the origin of things. 
All people have their versions of Genesis. The curiosity which 
prompts one to keep asking how the story ends is not less keen in 
inquiring how it began. Where different people have lived much 
alike, the explanations of their similar worlds are strikingly similar. 
One can match not a few of the elements in the Hebrew Book of 
Origins by the myths of the savage world. But this is too varied 
and too unhistorical a problem for us to pursue in detail here. 

The world of myth is one of miracle, where gods and even heroes 
are transformed before one's eyes, where, as in a land of dreams, 
animals talk, invisible presences are heard along the winds, trees 
imprison and earth engulfs. So unreal do these seem to the civilized 
man that he thinks of them as the conscious effort of invention, 
a product of that poetic capacity which he takes for granted in 
early peoples. But, however strongly the fancy plays in simple 
minds, the myth is seldom, if ever, the creation of individual, con- 
scious effort, — the result of a single expedition of the questing 
inteUigence. It is rather the booty of the tribe, the heritage from 
immemorial quests. The shaman or priest may mould mytholo- 
gies and transform them, as the epic poet may develop original 
incidents in his legend, but the range of his creative imagination 
is anything but bold and free in the sense in which Plato thought 
of its freedom. For instance, when Homer makes Athene take 
the form of a swallow he is not inventing as Kipling may have done 



i8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

in his Jungle Tales. Athene, or some such goddess, had been trans- 
forming herself for untold centuries before Homer embodied the 
miraculous incident in his narrative.^ 

In fact, what strikes the student of mythologies most is the 
poverty, rather than the richness, of the primitive imagination. 
Imagination must use the materials of experience to build its 
creations, however fantastically it may combine them, and as the 
range of experience of early man is much narrower than that of the 
civilized, the myths, which register these creations, run in relatively 
narrow grooves. There are common themes which one finds 
repeated with almost identical details in the most widely scattered 
tribes, — not only in the myths of origin but of such events as 
wars in heaven and floods on earth and such universal heroes as 
slay dragons, fight giants, and rescue the weak by prowess and 
miracle. Anthropologists formerly sought to trace these back to 
some common source and viewed them as evidence of a common 
origin of the varying cultures which preserved them. But now 
it is seen that no such history need exist. The war of the gods in 
which the beneficent deities of Ught and life overthrow the dragon- 
like forces of evU and chaos was a theme native to many other 
places besides the Nile and the Euphrates. Myths like those of 
Marduk and Horus were independent of each other ; for the sun- 
god represented the triumph of order and settled Ufe, when the 
earliest farmers began to tame the wastes, drain the swamps and 
plough the fields. In short, the history of the gods was but a 
reflection of the activities of the society which produced them. In 
this sense they are a sort of perverted, divine reflection of history, 
preserving in a distorting but vivid medium some portions of the 
general story of a people. "Myth is the history of its authors, 
not of its subjects ; it records the lives, not of superhuman heroes 
but of poetic nations." ^ 

This social origin and authorship of myth, while it does not pre- 

^ A more definite contrast might be cited in the descent of Athene from Olympus 
(Jliad, Bk. IV, 11. 75 sqq.), and Milton's description of Satan's fall. Homer's picture 
is based upon the fall of stars. "Even as the son of Kronos the crooked counsellor 
sendeth a star, a portent for mariners or a wide host of men, bright shining, and there- 
from are scattered sparks in multitude, even in such guise sped Pallas Athene to 
earth, . . ." Such portents furnished the inevitableness of the simile. 

* E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (2 vols., 3d ed., 1891), Vol. I, p. 416. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 19 

elude the possibility of individual creations and modifications 
now and then, enables one to understand two things which other- 
wise puzzle one in deahng with the primitive mind. In the first 
place that realm of mystery is not entirely mysterious. It is as 
much a part of nature as the rest. This means that the savage 
is conscious of crossing no closed barriers as he turns from the real 
to the imaginary. In the second place, the social beUef in the tale 
brings to its explanations somewhat the force of a suggestion of 
nature itself, and so they impose themselves upon the mind with 
the sense of things final and inevitable. 

At once, this brings us upon a fact more vital for the history 
of History than all the content of the myths, — the tendency to 
believe. It is well to interest oneself in the fate of the gods, but 
it is impious to inquire too much of them. This religious attitude 
of acceptance is largely responsible for the absurdities which the 
myths contain, since it is not fitting to apply the canons of common- 
sense criticism to them. But its significance extends far beyond 
the boundaries of myth and prehistory. It is still, in spite of the 
growth of criticism and of science, the ordinary attitude of the 
ordinary man. The first impulse upon hearing any tale is to 
accept it as true,^ unless it itself contradicts what has already been 
believed, or seems to imply such a contradiction. Credulity is a 
natural attitude of mind; criticism is one of the most difficult 
acquisitions of culture. The importance of this fact will furnish 
some of the main themes in the history which follows. 

The credulity of the primitive, however, has more excuse than 
ours, for he has a different appreciation of fact. We draw dis- 
tinctions between the real, the probable and the possible, between 
things that are in their own right and things whose existence de- 
pends upon that of others. This borderland of possibility we 
place outside the realm of fact, not losing sight of the condition 
upon which it rests. The savage stresses the fact and tends to 
forget the condition. The unhappy anthropologist who offers 

' Dr. Paul Radin has furnished me with an unusually interesting instance of this. 
During his researches among the Winnebagos he asked a half-breed, who affected dis- 
dain for most of the Indian beliefs, if he thought there were any truth in a medicine 
man's graphic and detailed story of his former incarnations. The puzzled reply was 
that he didn't know but thought there might be something in it, "for otherwise why 
did the shaman say so?" 



20 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

to do something for a native *'if he can" finds himself regarded 
as having broken his word if he does not fulfil his promise, even if 
the conditions remain unfulfilled. When we apply such an attitude 
of mind to problems of mythology it explains largely the positive 
character of the creations of what we call the primitive imagination.* 

Under such circumstances, the myth develops a life of its own. 
The conditional elements in it drop away; uncertainties become 
fact by the mere force of statement. Its origins are lost sight of. 
Hera may once have been the air and Demeter a sheaf of wheat, 
but somehow in the course of divine events, by common human 
consent, they became deities and lived henceforth the life divine. 
To us moderns it was a purely imaginary existence, but the myth 
acquires its authority upon the very opposite assumption. And 
when temples are erected to them, art and literature find in them 
their inspiration, when states trust to their protection and individ- 
uals turn to them for salvation, both imagination and memory 
are left far behind ; the myth becomes a real and potent element 
in the facts of history and life. 

And yet it is the divine or supernatural element in the myth 
which is its own best preservative. Whatever lies within the sphere 
of religion is protected, the world over, by a vast and unrelenting 
primitive criminal law, which we call the taboo. Everything con- 
nected with worship, from magic to mysticism, is sacred, and what- 
ever is sacred cannot be treated like ordinary things. It contains 
something of the power, diabolic or divine,^ which moves by super- 
nature and mystery to afilict or bless those who come in contact 
with it. Sacrilege needs no legal penalties in societies where 
religion reaUy rules; it enforces its own punishment through the 
terrors of the psychic world. So, just as the fetishes and altars 
used in worship are surcharged with this sacredness which ensures 
their protection, the myths which embody the story of the gods 
are preserved by their own religious quality. To know the story 
of the god, and especially to know his true name, is of the greatest 
importance to the worshippers, since in the story and the name 
lies some mysterious suggestion of potency. So the shaman and 

* The simple-minded novel-reader in the modem world has much the same atti- 
tude. The conditions of the story are forgotten. 

' Sacredness is a general term and has the power to curse as well as to bless. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 21 

his priestly successors, as those best fitted to deal with such sacred 
things, tend to become the keepers of the mystic tale along with 
other objects of cult. In the early world such specialization is 
more or less informal and by no means rigid; but the tendency 
to intrust the myths to theological care is already evident long 
before the development of hierarchies. 

We are not interested here in the later fate of the myths as parts 
of theological systems, for there they lose all but a faint echo of 
their historical sources, if such existed, and become at last a rather 
artificial element of religions which grow away from them, — as 
the modern world has grown away from the more incongruous 
stories of the Old Testament and the more miraculous legends of 
the saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages. Ritual,* in which the 
baldest, most compact statements and representations are reduced 
to epigrammatic and poetic terseness, preserves a last suggestion 
of the ancient origins, by reason of its direct connection with the 
altar and the rite, — sometimes even after the religion in which 
it is set has ceased to understand its meaning, — as in the well- 
known case of the Arval priests at Rome, reciting in archaic speech 
what had become little more than a magical charm.^ And yet, 
in such faint and unintelligible ways, the traces of past ages lasted 
on, — less history for the worshippers who listened to the mummery 
than for the modern historian to whom they are no longer sacred 
utterances, and who therefore is free to trace their human origins.^ 

* Ritual, whether in word or act, must be performed with absolute accuracy. 
Any error is sure to bring the wrath of the gods upon all concerned and the vengeance 
of society upon the blunderer. Anthropology supplies many instances of the inflic- 
tion of the severity of the punishment for carelessness or mistake. For example, 
see Franz Boas, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, 
in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for iSgs 
(published 1897). 

^ The magical or priestly formula sometimes repeats the potent words of the gods 
in some ancient myth, of which the formula is the only fragment preserved. A good 
example is given in A. Erman's Life in Ancient Egypt (tr. 1894), p. 353. A charm for 
bums was obviously taken from a call of Isis, the mistress of magic, for the aid of 
Horns : "My son Horus, it bums on the mountain, no water is there, I am not there, 
fetch water from the bank of the river to put out the fire." In this connection it 
might be recalled that the recital of the names of the gods, with all their attributes, 
in incantation or prayer, involved a certain amount of mythological lore. 

3 The persistence of even a mere divine name may furnish the clue to great events; 
for instance, if the Egyptian Re, the sun, is traceable to the Semitic root R'a, it in- 



22 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

But there is a human as well as a divine side to the myth, and 
as the divine tends to drop away or change except where embodied 
in ritual and preserved by priests, the human develops mainly 
by way of poets, into that antetype of history, — the legend. The 
gods still come and go ; they hold their councils as of old, and they 
seem to outrange the feeble will of man ; but in reality the human 
beings are the heroes ; upon them the interest of the tale and the 
sympathy of the Ustener are concentrated, and even the gods 
dispense with their divinity wherever the interests of the story 
demand it. 

It is not possible definitely to mark off the myth from the 
legend, for myths enter into all early narratives. And yet it may 
clarify our survey if we regard as legend those stories which carry 
the human theme uppermost. The legendary, therefore, lies be- 
tween the mythical and the historical. As we have just seen, myth 
penetrates it, and for long furnishes the dramatic element, the 
sudden turns, the swift surprises, the justice that tracks the feet 
of crime, the fate that stands behind and mocks — and pulls the 
strings. Thus often, as in Homer, the legend seems to be largely a 
repository for myth, in spite of all its worldly interests. Indeed 
the poet, far from being a bold innovator carrying the social out- 
look frankly away from the myth, is really a conservator of what is 

dicates an early Semitic invasion. Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near 
East (2d ed., 1913), p. 85. Even the images of the gods may preserve archaic cus- 
toms and so open up lost pages of history. The Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants 
of lower Babylonia of whom we have record, represented their gods with the long 
hair and beard of the Semites, which seems to indicate a previous Semitic culture, 
of which the religion at least persisted. In the same way the early gods of Egypt 
are dressed like the inhabitants of Punt — Somaliland — which is taken to indicate 
that the Southern Eg3^tians came from there. (Ibid., p. 91.) We do not have to 
go outside the Jewish and Christian rituals to see the persistence of similar sugges- 
tions of the past: the whole calendar of sacred festivals is a reminder of sacred 
history {cf. J. T. Shotwell, The Discovery of Time in The Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. XII (1915), No. 10, p. 253), the very pre- 
scriptions as to the methods of sacrifice, even the form of the temple (see recent 
studies on Orientation, such as H. Nissen's Das Templum and A. L. Frothingham's 
Circular Templum and Mundus in American Journal of Archceology, Second Series, 
Vol. XVIII (1914), No. 3), and the robes and sacrificial implements of the priests 
(see references in J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough, 12 vols., 3d ed., 1911-1920). Religion 
has proved to be the greatest reservoir of past usages; but its service to history is 
rather that of a social archive than a social historian. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 23 

otherwise outworn. The ancient tale acquires in his eyes a kind of 
sanctity which is the secular parallel of its sacredness in reUgion. 

In the naive creations of the early epics this emphasis upon the 
gods is taken for granted; but once the poets start upon their 
proper work of conscious creation in the realm of imagination, their 
true attitude toward myth becomes apparent. There has been only 
one great poet of the uncompromising, scientific mind, Lucretius. 
Even to our own day the mythology of the world has survived in 
its poetry. Nor is this all to be dismissed as the play of pure fancy. 
In an age of faith, Dante or Milton can impress their schemes of 
cosmology upon the world with at least as much success as the 
theologians. Even in Goethe's day the philosophy of life lost 
nothing by being deliberately expressed along the lines of old folk- 
myths, and the cruder imaginations could find more than symbol 
in the story of Faust. Poetry, in short, may have furnished a 
bridge from myth to history, but its connection with the farther 
shore has never been broken down, and although the inquisitive 
thought of the civilized world has moved across it to the conquest 
of reality, it still retains its ancient character. 

Legends, therefore, so long as they are preserved by the poets, 
mark but a single stage of the advance toward history. Poetry, 
as Thucydides pointed out, is a most imperfect medium for fact. 
Its ideal is of another kind. Beauty or power, emotional stress 
and thrill are its aims, and to achieve these it properly forsakes duU, 
calculable reality. Its mythical elements are the least misleading, 
for its human heroes are given imaginary roles ; their exploits are 
set in the world of romance, and from of old the world of romance 
has been, some way or other, the world of the unreal. Homeric 
warriors, for instance, use the bronze weapons of an age already 
growing distant in the days when the poems were recited. Then 
the bard exaggerates or distorts his story to please his hsteners; 
which means that each society in which it is recited impresses 
changes upon it. So, although much of the early past has been 
handed down to us in epic, in ballad and in the poetically turned 
legends of folk-lore, these artistic creations belong rather to the 
history of literature than that of history proper. 

And yet the early poet, like the priest, knew the tribal lore. He 
was held in high regard, not as a mere entertainer, like the travelling 



24 



INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



minstrel of a later day, but as a sage who knew the ways of gods 
to men, and who could draw enough lessons from the past to satisfy 
any barbarously moralizing Ciceros or Carlyles. He may have 
lacked history in the true sense of the word, but he at least knew 
that philosophy which teaches by experience. For the most im- 
portant part of his tale came to him by tradition, in contrast with 
the part he himself invented. The first qualification of the bard 
was rather memory than imagination. Imagination filled in the 
gaps, but the past supplied the theme. 

Legendary history is preserved by this oral tradition. There 
is, naturally, no other way to preserve it among pre-literate or 
illiterate peoples. But the extent of it and its relative reliability 
are a source of unfailing wonder to the student of history. For 
unlettered societies, when left to themselves, with no modem 
devices to fall back upon, make up for the absence of reading by 
an ahnost incredible extension of the power of memory. It is 
not the bard alone who can recite his story ; tradition becomes to a 
large degree a social heritage, and nothing is more remarkable than 
the way in which a tribe or clan will repeat its legends, generation 
after generation. Hour after hour, almost day after day, the primi- 
tive story-teller can recite not merely the deeds of gods and men, 
but the exact words of the ancient myths. Indeed this is, perhaps, 
one of the main reasons for the form of poetry in which it is cast, for 
rhythm and metre swing the memory along, while prose seems to 
snap the cord. So among early peoples, the whole record of the past 
tends to be embodied in poetry — more or less — from bald lists of 
names in genealogies arranged for a sing-song chant, to inspiring 
epic and stirring ballad. The role of memory is now lessening. We 
trust to books and put our memories with them on the shelf. But 
we can still testify to the acuteness of the primitive methods. 
When we try to memorize even a few names in a row, we uncon- 
sciously fall back upon the devices of our bardic forerunners and, 
if we can, commit them to memory in a sing-song.^ 

When we turn to examine the content of these early, legendary 

» This is not advanced as a general theory for the origins of poetry. There is 
virtue in rhythm besides its aid to memory, as the dance sufficiently indicates. Ritual 
also plays its r61e. But the rhythmic element in mere prosy lists hints at its utUity 
elsewhere as well. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 25 

traditions, where they are accessible, we find them, like the myths, 
perpetuating all kinds of things. It is impossible to delay here 
over any detailed examinations of them. Their study belongs to 
the field of folk-lore, a field in which scientific methods have made 
but little progress yet.^ But history may sometimes find in it at 
least a general guidance in matters otherwise unrecoverable. The 
incidental mention of natural objects helps to throw light upon the 
character of the civilization which produced the legend. For 
instance, the tales of early Rome point to a farming community. 
In like manner, the very absence of mention is sometimes just as 
significant. None of these same early Roman legends points to 
the sea. The story of Eneas' wanderings came in after Greek 
civilization had penetrated Italy. It was obviously manufactured 
after the Romans knew about Greece and appreciated Homer 
enough to wish to trace their ancestry to the fields of Troy. We 
know that this was the case because there are no primitive tradi- 
tions that correspond with it. It was invented to suit the occasion 
by men of a later age.^ 

^ At the close of the eighteenth century Herder pointed out the importance of 
folk-lore in the crude, natural poetry preserved by historic peoples down to the pres- 
ent. The work of the brothers Grimm and of the whole romanticist movement greatly 
enriched this popular literature. But the romanticists overburdened it with the 
trappings of their imagination and made it unreal either as representing primitive or 
modern ideas. Historical criticism, which had seen the legends of Homer and regal 
Rome destroyed, was, therefore, unwilling to grant even proper recognition to folk- 
lore as a serious occupation. Finally at the opening of the twentieth century, the 
comparative method, rescued in turn from its cruder uses, has enabled the historian 
to proceed upon cautious and promising principles for the appraisal of the value of 
traditions. 

2 See Jesse B. Carter, The Religion of Nutna (1906), and the masterly use of 
religious data for historical purposes by W. W. Fowler in his Religious Experience 
of the Roman People (191 1) ; or, for further research, the work of G. Wissowa, Religion 
und KuUtis der Romer (2d ed., 191 2). 

The myths of the historic nations, especially those of Greece and Rome, and to 
a less extent of the north of Europe, have been published in such a variety of forms 
and have entered into literature to such an extent as to make any short bibliography 
of the field wellnigh impossible. From T. Bulfinch's Age of Fable (rev. and enl. ed., 
1919), for children, to such works as R. Reitzenstein's Hellenistische W under erzahlungen 
(1906), which is for the most advanced scholar, through Handhiicher and dictionaries 
of classical antiquities, the student may pass a busy life in merely keeping up with 
the available works dealing with the subject. One thing only need be said here ; 
and that is that since the comparative method was first applied, by Max Muller, 
to the elucidation of the myths of Greece and Rome, — basing it upon philology 



26 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

There are, therefore, two main types of legends : the folk-tale 
that no one made, that was born in no one brain, but, like Topsy in 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, met a social demand, ready-made; and the 
false legend invented long after the events with which it deals, a 
romance produced to glorify a monarch, a nation or a noble house, 
like the genealogies that reached back to the gods and so flattered 
their happy recipient with divine ancestry. The dif&culty of 
deciding which kind one is dealing with, whether it is primitive or 
artificial, makes the task of the scholar an extremely delicate and 
treacherous one. For even the genuine folk-tales come to us worked 
over by successive generations until often so obscured that with the 
combined resources of archaeology, anthropology and history one 
can but guess at their value and true meaning.^ 

Looking over the field of myth and legend as a whole, we see 
that we are everywhere outside the boundary of genuine history. 
History may incorporate portions of their substance, but it differs 
from them in both means and end. It is not a thing of poetry but 
of prose; it needs sobriety and commonplaceness of expression, 

on the one hand for the names of the gods and upon natural phenomena, sky, sun, 
earth, etc., for their origin, — the study has made long progress. The anthropolog- 
ical archaeologists forcibly invaded the field in the twentieth century, and although 
their first attempts at interpreting were somewhat too confident and a bit careless, 
they have made over almost our whole conception of the religious outlook of the 
antique world. Sober surveys of this work may be found in L. R. Famell's Cults 
of the Greek States (5 vols., 1896-1909), and in W. W. Fowler's Religious Experience of 
the Roman People, while such works as those of Gilbert Murray, especially his Rise of 
the Greek Epic (1907), connect it with a genuine historical interest. The Egyptian 
myths, which fill so large a space in the works of Erman, Maspero or Budge, have 
been reexamined in a most illuminatmg survey by J. H. Breasted, in his Develop- 
ment of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (191 2). For Baby Ionia- Assyria, we 
have the works of R. W. Rogers, and those of Morris Jastrow, not to mention the 
output of European scholars, among whom L. W. King's contribution in supplying 
texts with English translation should be noted. Vide infra, Chaps. V and VI. 

^ A good example is the Horus myth of Egypt, which represents this Nubian 
sky-god leading his army of metal-workers, with their metal-tipped spears, to the 
conquest of his rival Set and the land of Egypt. The story as we have it comes from 
the latest period of Egyptian history, and is interwoven with details from the war of 
the Horus-bom pharaohs against the Hyksos in historical times, although many cen- 
turies before the myth was cast in the form in which we have it. Cf. H. R. Hall, The 
Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 91 sq.; J. H. Breasted, Development of Religion 
and Thought in Ancient Egypt, p. 38. 



PREHISTORY; MYTH AND LEGEND 27 

just as it needs rigid outlines, if the fancy which runs wild in legend 
is to be checked and the narrative made worthy of the credence of 
inquiring men. Then, that narrative must be intrusted to some- 
thing more reliable than memory — even social memory at its best. 
And finally it must be kept definite in outline and positive in dates. 
So history must pass by way of written records out of the realm 
of taboo and folk-lore, which priests and poets perpetuate. The 
vague or rambling tradition must become a straightforward narra- 
tive, taking into account the steadily passing years. There are, 
therefore, outside of myth and epic, two indispensable bases for 
history : writing and mathematics, — the one to record what time 
would otherwise indifferently blot out, the other to measure time 
itself in calendars and chronology. 



CHAPTER III 
BOOKS AND WRITING 

Writing ranks next to speech itself as the implement and em- 
bodiment of thought. Yet its evolution has been exceedingly 
slow and is still most imperfect. Even today, if we take the 
world as a whole, the great majority of men and women must learn 
by word of mouth alone whatever they are to know, since the 
magic of the alphabet and of its combinations on the printed page 
is still beyond their grasp. Yet the Australian blacks, the lowest of 
existing mankind, can read crude markings on twigs made by 
distant tribes ; ^ the Bushmen of South Africa — low grade among 
the Africans — can draw their pictures of the hunt almost to match 
the hieroglyphs of Egypt.^ From message sticks to picture- 
writing the gulf seems wide, and the next step, — from picture- 
writing to an alphabet — seems small in comparison. But on the 
contrary, while the cave-dwellers of Europe, ten to twenty thousand 
years ago, could draw the bison and the reindeer with a skill to match 
the artist of today, such simple things as letters are the invention 
of those comparatively recent times when merchant ships from 
Tyre and Sidon were already exploiting the markets of the Mediter- 
ranean. As for the extensive use of writing, in hterature, records 
or journahsm, it occupied no such place in the cultures of antiquity 
— even of Greece at its best — as it does today. 

One reason for this is obvious — the lack of paper. We have 
been taught in our history manuals the revolutionary ej0fects of 
the invention of the printing press upon the history of western 
thought, but paper is just as important as the press. Imagine 
what it would be like if our libraries were stacked with chiselled 
slabs of stone or tablets of baked clay, if our newspapers were sun- 

' Cf. A. W. Howitt, Notes on Australian Message Sticks and Messengers, in The 
Journal of the Archaological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol XYIH (1880) 
PP- 314-332. ^ ' 

'Cf. C. Menhof, Zur Entstehung der Schrift in Zeitschrift fur Sgyptische Sprache 
und Altertumskunde, Vol. XLIX (1911), pp. i sq. 

28 



BOOKS AND WRITING 29 

dried bricks. When papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, came 
to be used in Egypt, the writing changed, lost its slow, old pictures 
and became much like ours ; and instead of a few walls or stelae 
covered with hieroglyphs, there were libraries filled with manu- 
scripts. Stone, as a medium for writing, has a double disadvan- 
tage ; it is not only hard to manipulate, it is practically immovable. 
One has to go to it to read. The inscription is part of a monument 
instead of a thing in itself, like the writing on a piece of papyrus. 
Babylonia never suffered from this handicap as Egypt did ; owing 
to lack of stone it wrote on clay, inferior to papyrus but usable. 
It is hard to draw pictures or to write with a round hand on clay, 
so the Babylonian bricks and cyhnders were scratched with straight 
httle wedge-like marks. And the weight of brick or cyhnder was 
such as to force the scribe to write with almost microscopic fineness. 

It takes but a moment's thought to realize how the medium 
for preserving Hterature conditions its scope, and its place in society. 
What is written depends in a great degree upon what it is written 
on. It is well, therefore, before surveying the early records of 
history, to examine hurriedly the manner and method of the com- 
position, — the more so, as historiography seldom deigns to cast 
its eye on so purely material a basis for its existence.^ 

Stone and clay, the first two media of Egypt and Babylonia, 
were, as we have seen, definitely limited in their possibilities. 
There was need of a lighter, thinner substance, suitable for carrying 
around, yet strong enough not to break easily with general use.^ 
Egypt ultimately had recourse to the use of papyrus. Babylonia 
more to that of leather. But there was a primitive substitute for 
both of these which we must not forget. Leaves of trees sometimes 
furnish such a medium in tropical countries, particularly the tough- 
fibred palm-leaf, of use especially in India. The hieroglyphs 

^ * The literature on this interesting background of history is not extensive, and 
mainly goes back to the capital work of T. Birt, Das antike Buckwesen (1882). 

See also K. Dziatzko, Untersuchungen iiber ausgewaklte Kapitel des antiken Buch- 
wesens (1900), and other references below. 

* The distinction between the hard, heavy media for inscriptions and the lighter 
kind, furnishes the basis of a distmction between epigraphy and palaeography, the 
former dealing with monumental writing, the latter with writmg in its more general 
forms. Epigraphy properly belongs with archaeology; palaeography, however, carry- 
ing the history of writing parallel with successive epochs of culture, is a constant aid 
to history. 



30 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

preserve traces of its use in Egypt as well.^ In temperate climates 
where even this fragile writing surface is not at hand, wood fur- 
nished the commonest substitute. Our barbarian ancestors in 
northern Europe, improving a little on the twigs, which the 
earliest savages notched for messages or memoranda, inscribed 
their runic markings on rudely cut branches of trees .^ 

A new era in hterature was made possible with the use of the 
metalUc saw. When boards became common, they offered a good 
and ready medium, and were in general use throughout the antique 
world, wherever lumber was plentiful. Small, square or oblong 
boards were especially in demand as tablets for note-taking or 
memoranda; as such they were used by school children far back 
in ancient Egypt.^ But, although also serving at times for record- 
ing hterature, they were more generally used in Greece and Rome 
for matters of business and for correspondence, being lighter and 
cheaper than lead or other metallic tablets, — which were also 
used, — and cheaper than leather. In such cases it was customary 
to fold two tablets together,* and the interior cover was commonly 
covered with wax. Boards were also used, however, for formal 
inscriptions, the most famous being the white tablet, known as the 
album, upon which the Pontifex Maxim as Inscribed the events of 
the year and which was displayed at the Regia, — the origin of the 

* A good example is the scene of the gods writing the name of Ramses II on the 
leaves of a sacred tree, in R. Lepsius, Denkmdler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (12 
vols., i849-i8s9)> Sect. Ill, Vol. VI, Plate 169, and A. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt 
(tr. 1894), p. 347. 

2 Cf. Venantius Fortunatus {Opera Omnia, Part I, Bk. VII, Chap. XVIII), who 
wrote at the end of the sixth century : 

Barbara fraxmeis pingatur, runa tabellis 
Quodque papyrus agit, virgula plana valet. 

On the other hand, runic characters have now been found inscribed on various 
substances, stone and metal. 

' Cf. K. Dziatzko, Untersuchungen iiber ausgewahlte Kapitel des antiken Buchwesens, 
pp. 6, 19, 23. The Greeks, as well as the Romans, used them almost exclusively in 
the earlier days. 

* These tablets were also sometimes of lead or other metals. The two folded 
together were known as the diptyck. Often it was ornamented on the outer covers. 
Used widely for correspondence, diptychs were also sent around by consuls and other 
officials upon assuming office, to appraise their friends of the dignity and title. The 
Christian church, adopting this use, kept diptychs with the names of clergy, saints, 
and martyrs at their altars. The relation of these with mediaeval annals is of much 
interest in this coimection. 



BOOKS AND WRITING 31 

oflficial annals of Rome. In early Greece they were used to write 
down the works of the poets, which a still earlier age had committed 
to memory. Tradition has it that Greek tyrants, — presumably 
copying the example of the hbrary of Ashur-bani-pal of the seventh 
century, — gathered libraries and employed scholars to edit the 
classical texts. But the scholarly activity could not achieve much 
when it would require two hundred wooden tablets to arrange 
and handle the two Homeric epics .^ It is clear that wood, like 
stone or brick, serves only for the preliminary and casual phases 
of the history of writing .^ 

It is doubtful if the antique world could have developed the 
classical Uteratures in all their variety and freedom of scope, had 
there been nothing better to write upon. Two substances saved the 
situation, papyrus and leather. Of these two, the latter played 
little part in the Mediterranean world during classical antiquity. 
In the Orient, leather was always in use, and in the fourth cen- 
tury of the Christian era that form of it known as parchment 
superseded everything else. But the paper of Greek and Roman 
times was papyrus. 

As far back as the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., Eg)^tians 
knew how to cut through the stem of the papyrus reed, and, pasting 
two thin sUps of its stringy marrow back-to-back, cross-ways on, 
secured a tough and satisfactory writing surface. As we have 
already pointed out, the scribe could write upon it with a flowing 
hand, which ehminated much of the toilsome picture-writing of the 
genuine hieroglyph upon the stone. But yet, so impressive were 
the monumental inscriptions, so rigid the strength of Egyptian 
traditions, that the home of the papyrus did not produce that last 
essential to writing — the alphabet. 

By the twelfth century B.C., the business men of the market 
ports of Phoenicia, keen-witted as their Hellenic neighbors of a 
later day, seem to have realized the usefulness of Egyptian papyrus, 
as Egyptian records show that they imported it to their cities at 

^ Cf. K. Dziatzko, op. cit., p. 26. 

* If we rely upon etymology, the Romans, like some semi-barbarous people, once 
used the inner bark of the tree to write upon, for that is the meaning of their word 
for "book," liber. The word hook itself, with its several Teutonic variants, comes 
from the same root as that of the beech tree. 



32 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

least as early as the middle of that century .^ No one can say 
whether it was this importation of papyrus which helped them 
to invent the alphabet or whether the invention of the alphabet 
brought the trade in papyrus ; but, in any case, these two events, 
so important for the future — and the past — of the world's culture, 
were interrelated. 

The use of papyrus elsewhere seems to have spread relatively 
slowly. In western Asia it did not displace the widespread use of 
leather to any great extent. The Hebrew scriptures, for instance, 
were written on rolls of leather, not papyrus. The Greeks, too, 
were surprisingly slow to adopt it. Already by the middle of the 
sixth century B.C., they were familiar with the material, which they 
named "biblos" (/Su^Xo?) from the Phoenician city which traded 
in it. Herodotus, however, in the fifth century, describes the 
papyrus growing in Egypt without mentioning its use as paper, 
and so has left an open conjecture as to what he had in mind when 
he referred to /Sv^Xo?.^ As a matter of fact the Greeks were 
always hampered by the scarcity of papyrus, which they had to 
import. This partly accounts for the extent to which their litera- 
ture was cast in form for oral delivery rather than private reading, — 
as is seen even in the philosophical treatises, arranged in the 
shape of dialogues. There was apparently no great library at 
Athens, even under Pericles. The first public Hbrary in that city 
was not erected until the reign of Hadrian.^ It was in the land 
of the papyrus itself that the first great Greek library flourished. 
The date of the founding of the libraries of Alexandria is not quite 
certain, but the first was probably founded by Ptolemy I early 
in the third century B.C.* 

1 Cf. J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (s vols., 1906-1907), Vol. IV, p. 284. 
It seems likely that they also manufactured a paper from other reeds, perhaps 
from some grown nearer home. This may explain the treatment by Herodotus. 

'^From Biblos comes our word Bible. The paper itself, before it was written 
upon, was called x'^P^v^ or charta, which also suggests a changed history. A length of 
papyrus was termed t6/xos or tomus, from the fact that it was " cut off," or, in Latin, 
a volumen, from the fact that it was wound up. The Latin word liber refers to the 
whole book and is identical with volumen. Cf. T. Birt, op. cit.. Chap. I. 

'Cf. Pausanias, Attica, Bk. I, Chap. XVIII, Sect. 9; J. W. Clark, The Care of 
Books (2d ed., 1909), p. 6. 

* There were two : one apparently connected with the palace ; the other with the 
temple of Serapis. The chief benefactions are attributed to the son, Ptolemy 11. 



BOOKS AND WRITING 33 

The influence of these libraries of Alexandria, and of their libra- 
rians, upon the literature and thought of antiquity was very great. 
Even the seemingly trivial needs of the shelf-room classification 
had most important results ; for, in order to arrange their writings 
readily, they cut them up.^ The average strip of papyrus which 
could be easily filed away and in which one could readilyTfind ref- 
erences, was from twenty to thirty feet long. The parchment 
roll was therefore cut off to about this length. Since the older 
authors, those prior to the age of Alexandrian savants, had not 
composed their works with reference to any such bibliographical 
needs, the scholars deftly divided them into sections, "tomes" or 
books, to suit their needs. So the text of Herodotus was divided 
into nine sections, each set apart under the symbol of a Muse. 
Thucydides' history was similarly broken up into eight books. 
The purely bibliographical character of such a device comes out 
even more clearly in the use of letters of the alphabet for the divi- 
sions of Homer and Aristotle. After the scholars had thus recast 
the literature already written, the authors of more recent antiquity 
wrote with an eye to dividing their own texts so that the rolls would 
be of proper length and the pigeon-holes on the library walls would 
easily take them in. In this way the expedients of the ancient 
librarians affected the classics. 

All the antique, classical literature was produced under these 
conditions. Yet, until the recent discoveries of archaeology, not 
a classical text has reached us in its original form of papyrus roll. 
In fact papyrus itself disappears from common use, and its place is 
taken by parchment.^ The reason for this is not altogether clear. 
There was a decline in the output of the papyrus plant itself, and 
then it disappeared from the Nile delta altogether; but whether 

* The standard work on this whole subject of ancient books is T. Birt, Das aniike 
Buchwesen. See also E. Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Pale- 
ography (rev. ed., 1912), or F. W. Hall, A Companion to Classical Texts (1913) for good 
short accounts. There is a good account of libraries in J. W. Clark, The Care of 
Books. 

* Papyrus paper was still used to some extent through the first part of the Middle 
Ages. For instance, it was used at the papal court until the eleventh century. But 
parchment was much more durable. The ancients regarded a papyrus two or three 
centuries old as rare. Cf. K. Dziatzko, art. Buck, col. 939 sqq., Vol. Ill, in Pauly- 
Wissowa, Real Encyclopadie der classischen AUertumswissenschajt (1894-1918). 



34 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

this was due to the fact that papyrus culture and trade were under 
strict government control, — which in the later empire meant 
robbing the future to pay the present, — or whether the book trade 
was ruined — and hence papyrus culture — by a decline in the 
demand from readers, the fact remains that from the fourth century 
of our era the papyrus roll was replaced by an entirely different 
form of book, the parchment codex. 

The name parchment comes from the city of Pergamum, on 
the coast of Asia Minor. There, in the second century B.C., a 
Greek tyrant, Eumenes II (197-159), made his capital of a state 
that had been built out of the Macedonian Empire. On the crest 
of a lofty hill, dominating the city, he placed a palace, a temple, 
and a library that was one of the wonders of the world.^ Legend 
had it, recorded by the antiquarian Varro,^ that the rival tyrant 
in Egypt, Ptolemy VI, refused to send papyrus and that, as a 
substitute, Eumenes invented parchment. The story, though still 
frequently quoted, does not hold ; for the use of leather as writing 
material is as old as that of papyrus, or older ; it was common 
throughout Asia, and was referred to already by Herodotus. But 
the name of Pergamum, attached to the sheets of leather {pergamena 
charta) seems to indicate a new process of tanning and preparation, 
and a centre of the trade at Pergamum. 

For some five hundred years after the founding of the Pergamum 
library, papyrus still remained the common medium of writing. 
Finally, however, as we have seen, in the fourth century of our era, 
it was superseded by the parchment, no longer wound into long rolls, 
but cut like the leaves of a book and fastened together in somewhat 
the same form as the tablets of wood had been, in what was called 
a codex.3 Into these codices the works of antiquity were transcribed 
from the worn papyrus rolls by Christian scribes. What was not 
so transcribed was lost ; for, as we have said above, no papyrus text 
survived. The fate of the classical literatures, and of much history, 
depended upon the smaller pages of the new form of book. 

1 Cf. J. W. Clark, The Care of Books, pp. 8 sqq. 

» Cf. Pliny, Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII, Bk. XTEI, Chap. XI. Jerome 
repeats the story, with slight variation, Ep. VII ad Chromatium. Cf. T. Birt, op. cit., 
pp. 50 sqq. 

» The word cattdex or codex first meant the tree trunk. 



BOOKS AND WRITING 35 

The ease with which the vellum or parchment could be washed 
or scraped to clean off its past writing and the surface used again 
for more pressing needs, recommended it especially to the mediaeval 
scribes, since writing materials were so very scarce. Such paUmp- 
sests ^ still bore traces of their former use, and in this manner the 
half-obliterated original was often preserved, when a feebler texture 
like papyrus would not have retained it. The papyrus leaves could 
be cleaned by a sponge, but were not strong enough to be used a 
second time for lasting documents. The practice of scraping the 
wax tables is also referred to by Cicero, and must have been common, 
whatever the material used, so long as it was difficult to procure. 
The mediaeval palimpsests show by the fragmentary character of 
the original texts they preserve that "the scribes were indiscrimi- 
nate in supplying themselves with material from any old volumes 
that happened to be at hand." ^ Fragmentary as they are, however, 
these old texts, treated chemically and read critically by modern 
scholars, have restored many a precious passage of the lost literatures 
of antiquity. It is one of the ironies of history that books of devo- 
tion, used for centuries in the service of the Church which denounced 
the vanities of pagan thought and practice, should keep for the 
modern humanist those very texts of myth or history which other- 
wise would have passed into complete oblivion. 

The use of the codex lasted through the Middle Ages, and gave 
the suggestion for the modern book. Fortunately, during the 
century preceding the invention of printing by movable types, 
another substance began to be sufficiently common to cope with 
the increasing demand for writing materials. Paper is originally 
a Chinese invention, but was brought into Europe through the 
Mohammedan cultures of the Near East and Spain, As early as 
the twelfth century, sheets of it drifted into Christendom, through 
those two open doors, the Moorish and ItaHan trade, but it was 
not until the later part of the fourteenth century that paper became 
the general medium for writing. It still remained comparatively 
rare — and generally good — until the invention of a machine 
at the close of the eighteenth century enabled manufacturers to 
make more than a sheet at a time, — which is the way with the old 

^ From the Greek irdXiv, again, and <pdu, scrape. 

* Article Palimpsest in Encyclopadia Britannica (by E. Maunde Thompson). 



36 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

hand process, still in use in rare papers, bank notes and the like. 
But with the vast and rapid increase in the output of paper in our 
own day comes an attendant danger to contemporary history, of 
which historians and Ubrarians have warned repeatedly in vain. 
For the paper made today is the most fragile stuff upon which 
any civilization has ever intrusted the keeping of its records. All 
but a tiny fraction of the vast output of our printing presses is 
crumbUng and discolored waste a few years after it is printed upon. 
We are writing not upon sand but upon dust-heaps. The thought 
is a sobering one to any one who looks back, even in so short and 
superficial a survey as this, over the fate of other civilizations and 
the sUght and fragmentary traces they have left. 

We have mentioned, in passing, that the form of writing has 
to some extent depended upon the materials used. But writing 
has a history of its own, a history of so great importance to the 
historian that the study of the history of handwriting is a science 
in itself, palaeography.^ Even after the alphabet supplants hiero- 
glyphics, and so becomes the mere barren framework of words, its 
style changes with different cultures, and only those can read it 
who have made it a special study. For it requires constant famil- 
iarity with the crabbed and compressed text, with the forms of 
abbreviations and devices for shortening the interminable labor 
of transcription, to decipher the ancient manuscripts. Into this 
field, fundamental as it is to historical research, it is impossible 
to enter here. Fortunately the student of history today is able 
to travel far toward his goal, even in mediaeval and ancient history, 
without having to decipher manuscripts for himself. For, especially 
during the last hundred years, generations of scholars have been 
at work preparing the texts, and others have been equally busy 
criticising them, so that the day is almost past when the historian 
has to make his pilgrimage from archive to archive to compare 
and copy the major texts of his sources, and so be his own palae- 
ographer. The discipline involved is one which may always be 
indulged in to advantage, but the results to be obtained are grow- 
ing steadily less, as the great collections of sources, edited by the 
most eminent of scholars, fill up the shelves of our libraries at home. 

* From TttXatis, old, and ypd<pen>, to write. 



BOOKS AND WRITING 37 

All writing is in a sense historical, in that its purpose is to record 
something. So far we have been treating it almost as though it 
were an end in itself, but it is only a means for doing something 
else, such as stimulating thought or action. When we turn from 
the means to the end, we are brought face to face with the origins 
of history. 

The earliest markings were largely aids to memory, such as are 
in use throughout the savage world, — scratches on sticks or leaves 
or bark of trees, runic signs, wampum belts, ensuring that both 
parties to an agreement remember alike, spreading news or record- 
ing it. One of the most important of such devices is the indication 
of rights of property by symbols denoting ownership. Thus 
the Maoris of New Zealand marked their lands by wisps of grass 
on boundary trees. Trespassers knew that the inclosed spaces 
were taboo to all but the owner — by reason of curses, of which 
the wisp of grass was the symbol. A much more definite symbol of 
ownership would naturally be the representation of the proprietor's 
name, or that of his tribe. The common use of this was possibly 
long impeded by the fear that an enemy might secure such a name- 
picture for evil magic, — for if he secures your name and anything 
of yours, he can have power over you. In spite of such fear, — 
which must have hindered not only literature but the development 
of private property, — the use of totem signs is common to indi- 
cate the name of a tribe or clan. 

The earhest inscriptions, out of which grow the records of 
history, were, like these, mere monograms of names. They were, 
of course, the monograms of royal names, stamped on Egyptian 
stone or Babylonian brick, much as the letter boxes of England 
bear the symbol G. R. to indicate the reigning king. Such mono- 
grams, chiselled into the rock over five thousand years ago, retain 
ior us the name of the reputed founder of the first dynasty of 
Egypt. Recovered only a few years ago, they prove to us that 
Menes of Memphis, that shadow figure which headed the long Ust 
of shadow kings, and was already legend by the days of Herodotus, 
was a real man. The first inscriptions of Babylonia are similar 
royal names and titles. They are historical records only by cour- 
tesy. Imagine the history of Anglo-Saxon England based upon 
nothing but the Alfred jewel, or a historian of the distant future 



38 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

reconstructing the history of the Victorian era from a few stray 
stones on which the full titles of the empress queen were en- 
graved! In time, however, the titles expand, indicating con- 
quests by including new dignities and enumerating the lands 
over which the monarch rules. As the years go on the titles 
grow more specific and detailed, and now and then in the boastful 
phrases of an epitaph (which had been carefully prepared during 
the lifetime of the king), we have almost a summary of the main 
events of the reign. This, for instance, is as far as the records of 
the old Babylonian kingdom seem to have gone. 

As we have seen, the narrative grows out of the simple inscrip- 
tion almost unconsciously. Indeed it exists to some extent in 
the titles themselves, since the graphic hieroglyph tells the story 
as it depicts the results. The lord of the upper Nile smites the 
cowering inhabitants, the conqueror of Syria carries away the 
Semitic victims in chains. But the narrative also develops, along- 
side the public inscriptions, in tombs and temples; in tombs 
for the gods to read, in temples for the priests. Here, at last, 
we are on the verge of history; the temple record is the 
origin of annals. We are not beyond the verge, however, for 
these bald narratives are not histories, in the strictest sense. His- 
tory is retrospective ; these are mere lists of contemporary happen- 
ings. As the calendar developed, the events were entered year by 
year, giving us annals. But still that did not make them history. 
They were a sort of primitive journaUsm or official record, marking 
the present, not the past. The annalist writes down what is 
happening or has just taken place. He enters on the temple lists 
the death of a priest or king when it occurs, or registers conquests 
under the royal command of the conqueror himself. It is only 
because the present is eternally becoming the past that these notes 
of contemporary events take on the character of history — as 
today's evening papers will be history tomorrow. 

But the annal is also potentially historical. The past, not the 
present, gives it its value and interest. Moreover, the step from 
the annal to the chronicle is a short one. Add a few genealogies or 
the legendary deeds of the sovereign's divine ancestors and the 
narrative becomes historical. Where such a narrative follows a 
rigid scheme of years, as in the annal, we term it a chronicle. To 



BOOKS AND WRITING 39 

the reader of the narrative there is little difference, and the two 
terms are used loosely and interchangeably throughout the history 
of History. Moreover a pure annal, containing nothing except 
mention of contemporary events, would be hard to find. Even 
the ofl&cial annals of Rome, inscribed by the pontiffs with the yearly 
exploits of the citizens or prodigies of the gods, contahied portions 
of the earlier years rewritten from later sources. 

The subject matter of the annal or chronicle was therefore a 
miscellany, woven out of religion, war, catastrophes, legendary 
exploits or mere business items. Genealogies, for instance, which 
patriarchal iUiteracy perpetuated in the sing-song verses, were 
more safely embalmed in writing. These were especially valued by 
noble houses, who, in imitation of royalty, were sure to reach the 
gods at the other end. Needless to say, while they afford many 
a hint to the student of today, they were not more reliable than 
those prepared for some of our fellow-citizens at present. 

Since the annalists were generally the priests they early kept 
temple records, mainly from a business instinct. Donations from 
pharaohs or kings were sure to be entered, votive tablets recording 
miracles accomplished at a shrine fitted the scheme, as well as 
accounts of prodigies and portents ; and along with these developed 
lists of priests and priestesses in long succession. But most im- 
portant of all, they noted the festivals of the gods, and in watch- 
ing the recurring seasons, with the changing moon and the lucky 
and unlucky days, they began to measure Time. This, along with 
the discovery of writing itself, was the most decisive forward step 
in the history of History — perhaps hardly less in the history of 
civilization. We must turn aside to consider it in some detail. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MEASURING OF TIME 

Ttmf. is the basis of history, as space is of geography or matter 
of the physical sciences. UntU some method of keeping accurate 
track of it was discovered, the data of history were like an uncharted 
land or an unanalyzed substance. To us with our almanacs this 
seems like the simplest matter of observation and arithmetic, 
merely a counting of days, weeks, months and years. But when 
history began there were no almanacs or calendars to consult. 
Weeks were unknown, months were observed only from the super- 
stitious fears and beliefs attached to the changing moon, and the 
revolving years were too vast and vague extents of time to be 
measured off with any accuracy. There are really only two meas- 
ures of time of which the primitive mind is fully conscious: the 
day — and one day is like another ; and the season — and the 
seasons vary. A little thought shows that whole new sciences had 
to be evolved before the dates could be set along the margin of 
our annals — the sciences which make possible astronomy and 
through it a settled calendar for events that recur, and a fixed 
chronology for those which happen but once.^ 

Anthropologists point out that the greatest social revolution 
of primitive mankind came about when men, settling on the soil 
instead of wandering, and so accumulating goods which involved 
foresight, began to calculate for a future. From that dim sensing 
of futurity in which civilization dawned, the whole evolution of 
society has been conditioned by some reckoning of the passing 
of time. The calendars upon our walls make this now so simple 
and familiar that the fact escapes our attention. But it takes con- 
siderably more thought than most people are ever likely to devote 
to it, to realize that the calendar itself is an invention rather than 
a discovery, an art-creation, magnificent in its mathematical 

* Cf. J. T. Shotwell, The Discovery of Time, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology 
and Scientific Methods, Vol. XII (1915), Nos. 8, 10, 12. 

40 



THE MEASURING OF TIME 41 

perfection, but a product of human ingenuity all the same, and 
not the mere revelation of some laws of nature. 

Yet the artificial character of our calendar can be seen very 
easily. Some of our time-divisions are artificial on the face of them, 
— the divisions of the day and the massing of days into weeks. We 
could do without seconds or even minutes without much incon- 
venience ; and do so most of the time. Even hours vary greatly. 
The twelve-hour unit comes to us from Babylon, through Ionian 
Greece, — twelve being like our ten, the unit of measurement for 
anything. We might as well have had a decimal instead of a duo- 
decimal system; it all depended on the arithmetical tables one 
used. But one should not put too much stress on the hour as a 
division of the day, for, in general, it is only the point of time, 
within the hour or at its beginning or close, of which we are keenly 
conscious, — especially the time for commencing or quitting work. 
It is the same with weeks. There were none in ancient Greece or 
Rome. They, too, like the hours, come apparently from Babylon. 
They mark off seven days, because seven was a sacred number. 
Habits and religious beliefs have settled this cycle upon our minds 
with the weight of centuries; the rhythmic Sunday pause in our 
busy week-day industries impresses itself upon the imagination 
so that poetically inclined people attribute to nature itself a restful 
note upon the sacred day. But this is merely our tribute to social 
convention and taboo. Every day is a sun-day. Weeks are a 
fiction based upon superstition but perpetuated for their social 
value. Even now, however, there are many people who pay no 
attention to them; in the mills of modern industry, on railways 
or ships, where work continues without ceasing, the weeks are 
practically unrecognizable. But days, months and years are dif- 
ferent. Here nature seems itself to mark an interval. The turn- 
ing of the earth on its axis, of the moon around the earth and the 
earth around the sun, seems to furnish real units. It was undoubt- 
edly these which first gave men a mathematical idea of time. But 
when we come to apply the lesson, it is not so easy. 

The calendar began in registering these celestial phenomena. 
The first chronometer was the universe itself; its ever-recur- 
ring movements struck off the days, months and years as 
our clocks now strike off the hours. The days and years are 



42 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

thus in reality on a par with the minutes and the hours, only 
they are the product of a larger clock. Unfortunately, however, 
the clocks of the universe do not run together. The days do not 
fit the years and the months fit neither one. The exact solar 
year is not even 3655 days, awkward as that multiple would be; 
it is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds ! We have frankly 
given up trying to keep track of months that really go by the 
changes of the moon — a cycle that has no relation to our night 
or day. Yet this was the unit for twenty or thirty centuries in 
that home of astronomy, Babylon. When we pause a moment to 
consider these things, we begin to realize what baffiing mathematics 
lies behind our calendars and almanacs. For there are the stars, 
too, to keep track of, with their revolutions and conjunctions, 
coming and going at all sorts of intervals, planets zigzagging across 
the heavens in crazy patterns, out of touch with everything, and 
yet somehow forming, apparently with sun and moon, a final unit, 
composing a universe. What a tangled problem for Babylonian 
and Egyptian astronomers to work out ! No Chaldaean shepherds, 
"killing time" in pastoral loneliness and innocence, were ever able 
to evolve the science of astronomy. That venerable myth still 
lingers in respectable books : but astronomy was the product of 
learned priests, those first scientists and intellectual leaders, who 
developed it, through astrology, for the service of religion. 

The calendar developed everywhere as a cycle of religious feasts. 
It was the gods, not men, for whom or by whom the days were first 
marked out. The times for hunting and fishing, for sowing and 
reaping, the phases of the moon, the summer and winter solstice, 
and the like, upon which the attention of primitive men was so 
forcibly directed, early became associated with some idea of mirac- 
ulous power. The times themselves became " lucky " or " unlucky " 
— an idea still so common that we never stop to ask what it means.^ 
There was an uncanny power let loose in the world when the moon 
still hung visible in the sky by day, or under the blazing mid- 
summer sim. The primitive man cannot exactly tell whether the 
power is in the moon or sun or the day itself, but on that day he 
knows that it is there. So when animism produces its gods and 

1 See Hutton Webster, Rest Days, a Study in Early Law and Morality (1916), for 
an exhaustive survey of time taboos. 



THE MEASURING OF TIME 43 

demons these days are consecrated to them. The time for reaping 
is sacred to the god of the harvest, and so forth. The old scruples 
take a more definite turn. A part of the time becomes the property 
of the gods. It is henceforth a violation of divine law to work or 
transact business on the days thus set apart. HoUdays were at 
first genuinely holy days, and the calendar grew up around them. 
It was necessary to find some way by which the festival day, the 
dies nefastus, on which business was sacrilege,^ should not be violated. 
It was taboo; to violate it was not only wrong but dangerous. 
The power of an inherent curse, which is essential in the early 
idea of the sacred, protected it and assured it social recognition. 
Accordingly it had to be kept track of in order to ensure that the 
proper ceremonies should be celebrated upon it. Hence the elabora- 
tion of that succession of religious feasts and fasts which stUl per- 
sists in our church calendar. The idea would not naturally occur 
to one that the lists of saints' days and holy days which preface our 
liturgies are the historic remnants of the first marking of time. 
But in the practically universal superstitions about planting 
crops, gathering herbs or doing almost anything in the dark or the 
full of the moon we have a trace of something infinitely older than 
any sacred date in the prayer-book — a first vague fear of the un- 
usual or uncanny, out of which theologies, as well as calendars, 
were born. 

Once grant that days differ in their virtues, that some are good 
for one thing, some for another, it is of the utmost importance 
to know which is which. In Hesiod's Works and Days we have 
the program outhned for the farmer of the earliest age of historic 
Greece. In the so-called Calendar of Numa we have the priestly 
reckoning for ancient Rome. But in Egypt and especially in 
Babylon, where the sky is so clear that, as the report ran in Rome, 
even the stars cast shadows, the mechanism of the heavens first 
produced an adequate system. 

Babylon bears the proud title of Mother of Astronomy. It 
was a title already admitted by Greeks and Romans, to whom the 
words "Chaldaean" and "astronomer" (or rather astrologer) 
were practically synonymous. Modern scholars agree as to the 

* The Romans, characteristically viewing things from the practical point of view, 
had the terms inverted : the dies fasti were those on which business was hermitted. 



44 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

justness of the claim ; but the careful study of newly found mscrip- 
tions places the scientific achievements of Babylonia and Assyria 
not at the opening but at the close of their long history. However 
much the priests of those distant centuries watched the heavens 
for portents and omens, their observations were not sufficiently 
systematic to enable them to measure the recurring periods of sun, 
moon and stars with that accuracy necessary for an unvarying 
calendar until after at least two thousand years of priestly lore. 
The Semites clung with the conservatism of superstition to the 
phases of the moon. Although they had grown civilized, — and 
civilization must arrange its work according to the sun, because 
nature does so too, bringing the recurring duties of the seasons, 

— these old desert-dwellers, and their neighbors who learned of 
them, never broke away from the lunar month and the lunar year. 

No one knows when or how this reckoning was first adopted ; 
but a study of primitive peoples the world over today shows that 
the moon and not the sun is generally the earliest guide toward 
the calendar. Wherever agriculture is not much developed, the 
moon dominates, owing both to its uncanny associations and to 
the shortness of its cycle. The origins of the lunar calendar of 
Babylonia, therefore, apparently lie beyond all the long story of 
its civilization. The records themselves carry us back, however, 
to the middle of the third millennium, when we find a Babylonian 
year of twelve lunar months, making up 354 days, with a thirteenth 
month thrown in once in a while — making that year 384 days — 
to bring the religious festivals and the business world right again. 
There was no absolute certainty as to what years should be length- 
ened and what ones should be left the normal length ; the matter 
was in the hands of the priests. This unwieldy calendar spread 
throughout western Asia, wherever the cuneiform script carried the 
message of Babylonian culture. It was adopted by the Jews and, 

— apart from other fragments of it embedded in our calendar, — 
we still have a positive reminder of its' difficulties in our festival of 
Easter. 

But so much observation of the moon ultimately produced an 
astronomical cycle of great importance, that of the moon with 
reference to the sun. It was discovered that in nineteen years 
the moon returned to almost its original position with reference 



THE MEASURING OF TIME 45 

to the Sim,* a period destined to be used for chronology by the 
Greeks. This discovery was not made until the eighth and seventh 
centuries B.C., however, in that period when the study of the uni- 
verse began to assume more calculable form, and astrology — still 
rooted in religion, but verging toward science — rose to supersede 
the crude old fantasies of the earlier and barbarous priestcraft, 
^hen we come upon a strange and happy interworking of calendar 
and chronology^ To foretell an eclipse, or a conjunction of the 
stars, it was necessary to know the period of time which had elapsed 
between such eclipses or conjunctions in the past. So, looking 
forward to forecast the future, the astrologer found himself obliged 
to consult the records of the past, and the more he sought for 
accuracy in his calendar the more he needed it in the royal or 
priestly annals which supplied him with the data upon which he 
had to build. In short, mathematics began to emerge from the 
position of a mere tool of superstition, in which the luck of numbers 
combined with that of the stars in a jumble of folly, and to assume 
its proper role as the basis of definite knowledge. 

(This was an epoch in the history of thought, an epoch of funda- 
mental importance for history, for from that time to the present 
the years have been numbered in regular, unbroken succession) 
The list of the kings of Assyria whose dates are thus fixed and 
accurate began in the year 747 B.C., the first year of a somewhat 
insignificant monarch, Nabonassar. This list was used by the 
great astronomers of Alexandria, who finally worked out the problem 
of calendar and chronology as far as they were solved in antiquity, 
and it has been preserved in what is called the Canon of Ptolemy. 
Through these savants the Babylonian- Assyrian year was translated 
into the "fixed" year of Egypt, i.e. 365I days ; and to the "Era of 
Nabonassar " were added those of the Persian and Alexandrian 
empires, and finally the list of Roman emperors, down to the year 
160 of our era. So that from 747 B.C. until the present, the years have 
been kept track of in continuous, if varied, reckoning. But the Canon 
of Ptolemy was used by astronomers, not by antique historians.^ 

'The time between eclipses was seen to be 18 years, 11 days, or 223 lunations 
("Saros"). 

2 The importance of the "Era of Nabonassar" for chronologists was first seen by 
Panodorus, the creator of the Alexandrian school of chronologers, in the opening of 



46 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

The mention of Alexandria naturally suggests the contribution 
of Egypt. But it was not Egyptian so much as Greek science which 
made the name of Alexandria so illustrious in antiquity, and the 
great astronomers who worked there found little in the long cen- 
turies of Egyptian culture to help them in their study of astronomy 
or chronology. (This seems strangely paradoxical when one reads 
in modern histories of ancient Egypt of the great achievements of 
its science and, above all, that it bears an even proudey title than 
Babylon as the land which produced the solar yeary The date 
when that event took place is a matter of dispute among Egyptolo- 
gists; but if the calendar year of 365 days was introduced at a 
time when it fitted the solar year day for day, the nineteenth of 
July,^ 4241 B.C., would be the first day of the year one of the new 
calendar. This date is reached by calculating back from a known 
date in the third century of our era, when a Latin writer, Censorinus, 
tells us that the solar year of Egypt was two months behind the 
calendar year. As the calendar year was about a quarter of a 
day short in length, it had been gaining on the solar year that much 
yearly, so that in 1460 years (4X365), it would gain a whole year. 
Thus, the two had coincided about 140 a.d., of which fact further 
evidence exists, and again at 1460-year intervals. The third of 
these, 4241 B.C., is, in the opinion of Professors Eduard Meyer 
and J. H. Breasted, the starting point for the invention of the 
calendar.^ It was a remarkable achievement. What long and 
puzzling computation, what tables of priestly science and records 
were at the disposal of those who inaugurated it, no one can tell. 
When one compares this solar year, only a little over six hours 
wrong, with the grossly inaccurate lunar year of 354 or 355 days 
in use in the rest of the world throughout most of antique history, 
it seems at first to indicate something like a Hellenic rationaHsm 

the fifth century a.d. See H. Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische 
Chronologie (1898), Part 11, p. 227, who traces the development of the Canon of 
Ptolemy through the Syncellus into Byzantine chronology and so opens up the con- 
nection with the Middle Ages. 

^ The day when the star Sirius rose at dawn, at the opening of the Nile floods. 

* For discussion, see J. H. Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. I, Sects. 
38 sqq. There is a short, clear account by H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near 
East, p. 19. The chief protagonist of the longer chronology of Egypt, Professor 
Flinders Petrie, is now regarded as having been extreme. 



THE MEASURING OF TIME 47 

at work in Egypt as long before the Greeks as we are since them. 
But this impression of Egyptian superiority is hardly borne out by 
fuller study. For, not only did Egypt fail to make good its early 
promise in astronomy/ but by failing to rectify the error of a quarter 
of a day, its calendar year came to have no real correspondence 
with the solar year, as we have seen. And, finally, the ancient 
Egyptian did not know how to make the discrepancy between the 
official and the true solar calendar the basis of a calculation of 
dates in history. There is no trace of his having used the (Sothic) 
cycle of 1460 years. It is the modern scholar who uses it to check 
up his calculations. 

rin chronology, therefore, as in the calendar, the Egyptians have 
no such contribution as might be expected from the promise of their 
early texts^ Moreover, the more detailed data for chronology 
are as irregular as the calendar. The years were numbered, not 
in a straight and continuous succession, but according to striking 
events, campaigns, the years of the pharaoh's reign, or (especially) 
the levy of taxes. When the state was thoroughly organized, the 
treasury officials "numbered" the royal possessions every two 
years, and the regnal years were known as "Year of the First 
Numbering," "Year after First Numbering," "Year of the Second 
Numbering," etc. Whatever knowledge the priests may have 
had of the period involved in the long succession of Egyptian 
dynasties, — and Hecataeus and Herodotus show that they had 
some, — it was left for the twentieth century a.d. to disentangle 
the problem for the world at large ; and much is still to do. 

rrhe Babylonians and Assyrians had the practice of naming 
rather than numbering their years ^ There was some priestly or 
royal functionary whose duty it was to proclaim what event or 
man should give the name to the year. It was to be the year of 
the magistracy of so-and-so, or the year when a battle was fought 
or a city taken. There is a touch of casual history in this, but it 
is too haphazard to be of much use. For in the first place, one never 
knew, until the functionary made up his mind — perhaps toward the 
end of the year — what the year really was ! Combine that with a 
lunar calendar, and one can see that there is work for the Baby- 
lonian scholar as he struggles with the problem of Sumerian date- 

' It even failed to note eclipses. 



48 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

lists, which contain tjie names of the years, as recorded by the 
Babylonian scribes.^ (Neither Greeks nor Romans worked out by 
themselves any adequate reckoning of timej The lunar year was 
the basis, and with all their ingenuity, they could not make it work. 
In Greece it was easily seen that the 354 days did not exactly fit 
the twelve lunations of the year, being short by 8.8 hours. So (if 
the old accounts are correct) they put in a month every second 
solar year, which brought the total up to about 7^ days more than 
the right amount. In order to meet this inaccuracy, the inter- 
calation was then omitted every eighth year. This octaeteris or 
luni-solar cycle of eight years was in itself not rigorously exact 
and was not systematically carried out. In 432 B.C. the astronomer 
Meton proposed the 19-year luni-solar cycle, of which we have 
spoken above. It was not adopted, however, until the second half 
of the fourth century. Once adopted, it was naturally destined 
to play a very important role in later classical and ecclesiastical 
chronology. The astronomical cycle is reaUy slightly less than 
19 years, however, and further corrections were necessary. Tin fact 
so long as the motions of the moon remained the basis of reckoning, 
the calendar was sure to be imperfect/ 

The Romans began with a lunar calendar, but since they re- 
garded odd numbers as the lucky ones, they made the year 355 
instead of 354 days. Then they added a month every second year, 
inserting it between the 23d and 24th of February, so that the 
mean length was 366^ days. To get rid of the extra day they had 
recourse to a clumsy device, — perhaps based upon the old Greek 
eight-year cycle, — ordering that every third period of eight years 
should have three instead of four intercalary months, and that they 
should be of 22 days each. This made the year 365 j days. But 
the pontiffs were left discretion in adjusting the calendar to the 
needs of astronomy, and they seem to have adjusted it (in some 
cases at least) rather to the needs of their friends, — having long 
years when those were in office whom they wished to favor, and 
short ones when their enemies were in power ! In any case, the cal- 
endar fell into such confusion in the last years of the republic that 
it was out by three months, judging by the solar year. The decree 

* There is a clear, short summary in R. W. Rogers, A History of Babylonia atid 
Assyria (2 vols., 6th ed., 1915), Vol. I, Chap. XIII. 



THE MEASURING OF TIME 49 

of Julius Caesar was the result, fixing the year at 365 days with an 
extra day in every fourth year. The ancients have attributed the 
reform to the intercourse with the savants of Alexandria, but there 
is also some ground for connecting it with a simple old-fashioned 
solar year of Italian farmers, of which we have fragmentary but 
definite traces even in the official calendar, and which in its turn 
may have been affected by the farming calendar of the Greeks. 
If this be true we have a single line from Hesiod to Csesar. 

The first reformed year began on the first of January, 46 B.C. 
(708 A. U. C). The months took their place in it,^ and then 
Christianity brought in the weeks from Judaea — and Babylon. 
The year remained, as we have seen, a fraction of a day too short, 
and there was no absolute agreement yet as to when it should begin. 
But these were matters never settled until the sixteenth and even 
the eighteenth centuries of our era. 

We need to know this much of the origins of the calendar in 
order to complete our survey of antique chronology. In both 
Greece and Rome, — after the fashion of Babylon and Egypt, — 
the year bore the name of the ruling magistrates. In Rome it 
was named after the consuls, in Athens after the first archon, in 
Sparta after the first ephor, etc. As it was found necessary for 
practical purposes to keep lists of these, from the calendar we pass 
not only to chronology but to the crudest of annals. ^ Thucydides, 
for instance, had only the Athenian lists of archons, the Spartan 
lists of ephors and the lists of the priestesses of Hera in the temple 
of Argos to rely upon, in addition to the festivals.* The cycle of 

1 Julius Caesar's months were to be of alternate length, the odd numbers being 
31, the even numbers 30 (except February). That would have made a simple year to 
reckon with. But when the eighth month (the fifth in the old year) was named after 
Augustus, his vanity was gratified by adding a day to it to make it as long as that 
of Julius. Then, m order to avoid having three months of 31 days together, Septem- 
ber and November were reduced to 30, and 31 were given to October and December. 

"^ The vagueness of an idea of extent of time in Greek history can be seen by the 
fact that "generations" were used to help reckon time and this was roughly put at 33 
years, although the period varies. In Herodotus one comes upon a system of 23 years. 

' The only continuous list of the Attic archons which has come down to us is a 
copy preserved in the history of Diodorus, but a growing body of inscriptions supple- 
ments it now, and enables the modem scholar to recover more than the ancients knew 
themselves. 



so INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

the Olympiad, the four-year period based upon the celebration of 
the Olympic games, by which later ages reckoned Greek history, was 
never used officially by the city states, and really was not taken over 
by historians and chronographers until about the end of the third 
century B.C. The credit for its introduction seems to belong to 
Timaeus (c. 350 B.C.), an indefatigable antiquarian and historian 
whose unphilosophical cast of mind apparently left him free to 
indulge a singularly un-Hellenic taste for dates. But it was a 
geographer rather than a historian who finally attacked the problem 
of chronology in a critical spirit. Eratosthenes, who flourished 
about 276 to 194 B.C., and who, as librarian of the Alexandrian 
library, was equipped with the science of the East as well as with his 
native Hellenic genius, fixed the dates of the great epochs of Greek 
history in what was destined to be the accepted chronology of 
antique as well as of Christian historians. Into this we cannot go 
further at present.^ Nor need we do so for this chapter of our 
history of History. The crude old reckoning of Rome, from the 
fabled founding of the city, 753 B.C., and the Olympiads remained, 
for later classical antiquity, the two eras in general use. 

Looking over this chapter of our intellectual evolution one is 
impressed with the slowness of its progress. The ancient world 
could come to its full maturity without any clear idea of the passing 
years, with even no accurate knowledge of what a year should be. 
Yet does not such vagueness correspond with our own experience? 
The past is all one to us ; yesterday as dead as the centuries of 
Eg3rpt. Only by the magic of memory can we even recall its faded 
color or catch an echo of its silenced voices. How that memory 
has become a social and undying heritage, a heritage that hallows 
its own possessions, is the theme of the chapters which follow 
on the history of History. 

1 Apollodorus of Athens, applying the conclusions of Eratosthenes, drew up a 
metrical Chronica in four books, dedicated to Attalus of Pergamum, which became 
the popular handbook on the subject. Both this and the works of Eratosthenes are 
lost, but fragments were preserved by the Christian chronologers, Julius Africanus, 
Eusebius, Jerome and Georgius Syncellus, and so this still is a primary base for the old 
Greek chronology. Vide H. Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische 
Ckronologie. 



CHAPTER V 

EGYPTIAN ANNALS 

The historians of ancient Egypt and Babylonia are not an- 
cient Egyptians or Babylonians but modern archaeologists. Their 
achievement — one of the greatest in all the history of scholarship 

— piecing together the annals of centuries which often left no 
conscious record of their own, has obscured the poorness of the 
sources out of which the history of the earliest civilizations is made. 
In reahty the written history of the first nations of the ancient 
world was a very slight affair. In all that vast spoil of the East 
which now lies in our museums, there is a surprisingly small amount 
of genuine historical record. 

It is possible, of course, to make too confident statements about 
the scope of a subject of which our knowledge depends almost 
entirely upon chance. For it is chance which has preserved 
what has been preserved of the material of this early history. The 
statement is true of all history, but is especially applicable where 
thousands of years and changing civilizations have in turn devas- 
tated and used again the material of earlier ages. Moreover, the 
permanence of such a record does not depend upon its importance 

— as is the case, more or less, with traditions. It is due rather to 
the durability of the substance upon which the record is inscribed, 
and the chance that the inscription hes undisturbed. Mortgages 
for garden plots, baked into the clay of Babylon, have survived 
long after the plot was desert sand and Babylon itself a heap of 
ruins. Sometimes chance plays strange tricks, preserving frail 
papyri or parchment while the stone disappears. A building in- 
scription was placed upon a huge stone stela by Sesostris I, in his 
temple at Heliopolis, nearly two thousand years before Christ. 
" The great block itself has since perished utterly ; but the practice- 
copy made by a scribe, who was whiling away an idle hour in the 
sunny temple court, has survived, and the fragile roll of leather 
upon which he was thus exercising his pen has transmitted to us 

51 



52 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

what the massive stone could not preserve." ^ The stone had been 
there five hundred years before the copy was made ; but now stela 
and temple have alike disappeared. The student of history can 
never know how much of what was set down in distant ages has 
been blotted out in a similar manner. Archaeology, it must not be 
forgotten, is a science of ruins. 

By taking the sources as we have them, the striking fact remains 
that history, the one branch of literature which one might expect to 
find develop first, seeing that it carries on tradition and that its poetic 
counterpart is the epic, nevertheless is hardly to be found at all in 
these early cultures, except where a mythic content contributes the 
interest of marvels and wonders, — a world flood or something of 
the sort. In all the inscriptions of ancient Egypt there is no work 
that can be termed a ''history of Egypt." There are some annals 
that are expansions of the lists of royal names ; and there are boast- 
ful notices of contemporary pharaohs, but of the idea of a history of 
the successive ages of Egyptian civilization there is not a trace. 

One reason which has been advanced for this absence of history 
in ancient Egypt is that the pharaoh of the time was so intent 
upon his own greatness that his courtiers did not venture to exalt 
the deeds of his ancestors for fear of belittling his own.^ The path 
to royal favor lay rather in covering the walls of monuments with in- 
scriptions describing what the present pharaoh had done or could do. 
In any case, no successor of even the great monarchs of the eighteenth 
dynasty ever deigned to record their exploits in the form of history. 
The court scribes busied themselves with the more profitable enter- 
prise of depicting the events or scenes of their own day. In the 
literature of ancient Egypt, history, as we understand it, is absent. 

Mention of "the scribes" recalls the high esteem in which their 
work was regarded. It was the profession for ambitious men, who 
might rise even to princely state by means of it.^ Scribes kept the 
accounts of either government or nobles, for everything in the 
large establishments was recorded by these busy forerunners of the 
modern lawyers or trust companies. "Nothing was done under 
the Egj^tian government without documents ; lists and protocols 

* J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. I, pp. 4-5. 

' Cf. E. A. W. Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914), p. 99. 

' Cf. A. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Chap. XIV. 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS S3 

were indispensable even in the simplest matters of business. The 
mania for writing ... is not characteristic of the later period only ; 
doubtless under the Old and the Middle Empire the scribes wrote 
as diligently as under the New Empire." ^ In the case of legal 
texts we have almost the whole modern machinery. "The docu- 
ments were then given into the care of the chief librarian of the 
department they concerned, and he placed them in large vases and 
catalogued them carefully. . . ." ^ and so had them readily avail- 
able for reference, in case the lord called for them. But so com- 
pletely was this bureaucracy under the thumb of the ruler that it 
does not furnish a starting point for that criticism which is the be- 
ginning of historical knowledge. The old writings were sometimes 
appealed to in the practice of government, as when the founder 
of the twelfth dynasty, in deciding upon the boundaries of the 
provinces, fell back upon "what was written in the books and what 
he found in the old writings" "because he so loved the truth. "^ 
But the love of the truth for its own sake, in the unpractical fields 
of scientific research, was left for a later age. 

There is something mediaeval in the attitude of later Egypt 
toward its own past, a sense of dimness, a failure to grasp its reality * 
even with reference to such abiding things as religion. This was 
accentuated by the change which came over hieroglyphics, render- 
ing the old writing hard to understand. Under the circumstances 
they did what other people have always done under the same 
circumstances ; their learned men, mostly priests, sought in allegory 
an explanation for the texts, and having found that key to the 
past had less need of another.^ 

* A. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 52, 112. C/. J. H. Breasted, A History of 
Egypt (2d ed., 1909), Chaps. V, XI, XIII. 

^ A. Erman, op. cit., p. 114. The largest and finest of all the papyri, the Harris 
papyrus, is an enumeration of the benefactions of Ramses III to gods and men during 
his reign. It is 133 feet long, containing 117 columns, usually of 12 or 13 lines. 
Cf. J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. IV, pp. 87-88. 

' From R. Lepsius, Denkmaler atis Aegypten und Aethiopien, Sect. II, Vol. IV, 
Plate 124, quoted in A. Erman, op. cit., p. 91. 

* Cf. A. Erman, op. cit., p. 39. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, 
p. 99, says the names of the pre-d)mastic kings were to the men of the nineteenth 
dynasty like Hengist and Horsa to the English of today. 

^ Cf. A. Erman, op. cit., pp. 346-347. "In this respect the Egyptian scholars did but 
follow the same course as the mystical writers of the Middle Ages, who made out that 



54 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Egyptians may have done little with history but they treasured 
myth and legend. In the twentieth century B.C. we already meet 
with the prototype of Sinbad the sailor. Tales of wonders wrought 
by ancient wise men and magicians ^ were as effective then as now 
in whiling away hours of leisure, when history would be too for- 
bidding a discipline. There were also myths of origin ; stories of 
the gods, how they came from the Holy Land in the south country .^ 
But as the centuries passed the myths got strangely mixed. For 
instance, the misreading of an inscription on the tomb of an early 
king at Abydos led to a popular behef that Osiris himself was 
buried there, and thus started a new cult.^ We shall find such local 
name-myths again in the origins of the Old Testament. But there 
is no need to follow them here into the tangle of Egyptian religious 
conceptions. 

If Egypt did not produce "history" in our sense of the word, it 
at least possessed the framework for it in the lists of royal names, 
which were displayed in magnificent profusion, along with the 
reigning monarch's monogram or portrait. Three such tablets, of 
Abydos, Sakkara, Karnak, may be mentioned for light they throw 
on Egyptian chronology. In the first, Seti I, of the nineteenth 
dynasty (about 1300 B.C.), accompanied by his son Ramses II, has 
before him seventy-five of his predecessors ; in the second, Ramses 
II has some forty-seven names on the list before him ; ^ while in the 
third, Thothmes or Thutmose III of the eighteenth dynasty is 
adoring sixty-one. Modern research has verified the accuracy of 
the two former lists, by comparison with the monuments.^ No 
wonder the priests who kept such lists were able to make a lasting 
impression upon the Greek travellers who were to come at a later 
date to learn from them the folly of tracing one's descent from 

both Bible and Vergil were allegorical ; the Rabbis and many interpreters of the Koran 
have done the same ; reverence for ancient literary works, if carried too far, always 
bears the same fruit." Vide infra, the section on allegory in Christian historiography. 
' Cf. J. H. Breasted, A History of Egypt, p. 203. A. Erman, op. cit., Chap. XV. 
E. A. W. Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Chap. X. 

* Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 91. 

' Ibid., p. 103 ; cf. J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. I, Sect. 609. 

* Cf. E. A. W. Budge, A History of Egypt (8 vols., 1902-1904), Vol. I, pp. 119 sqq. 
(Tablets of Abydos, Sakkara and Karnak given in illustrations.) 

6 C/. H. R. HaU, op. cit., p. 12. 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS 55 

the gods in the sixteenth generation.^ The fact that Egypt was 
itself a museum, preserving a sort of monumental history of the 
kings, must also have impressed the mind with an enduring sense of 
the past; but religion rather than history profited from such 
curiosity as the spectacle produced. The weight of authority was 
in the hand of time. 

The earliest historical record which has come down to us, how- 
ever, is a development from just such lists of names. It is the 
famous Palermo stone, so-called from the fact that it is in the 
museum at Palermo,^ — a small stone, of black Diorite, one of 
the hardest of stones, only about seventeen inches high, nine and a 
half wide and two and a half thick. On this stone, somewhat less 
than two thousand years before the oldest parts of the Old Testament 
were written, Egyptian scribes copied the names and recorded the 
known facts of the reigns of five dynasties before their time. The 
stone itself, as is apparent from its general appearance and from 
the character of the text, is but a small fragment, broken from a 
larger slab. Egyptologists, calculating from the spaces of reigns 
and their arrangement, have supposed that the original was about 
seven feet long and two feet high ; but this is mere conjecture. 

The date when the annals were inscribed upon the stone can 
be set with confidence as the fifth dynasty, which ruled in Eg)^t 
according to a widely accepted reckoning, from 2750 to 2625 B.c^ 
The portion of the stone preserved covers only the first three reigns 
of that dynasty.^ 

1 Vide infra, Hecataeus. Sometimes the names were not safe in the keeping of a 
jealous descendant. Queen Hatshepsu, "an Egyptian Catherine II," had the name 
of her brother, Seti I, who preceded her, erased from his monument. A. Erman, 
Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 43. Thothmes III, in turn, had her obelisk waUed up. Cf. 
J. H. Breasted, A History of Egypt, pp. 282-283. 

^ A small fragment of it is also at Cairo. 

' Although known to Egyptologists for some forty years, no careful studies of the 
Palermo stone were made before the twentieth century. The first reference to it was 
made in 1866 by E. de Rouge in his Recherches sur les monuments qu'on pent attribuer 
aux six premieres dynasties de Manetkon (p. 145), using a print that had been sent him. 
The stone was then in a private collection, but in 1877 it passed into the possession 
of the Museum of Palermo, where it was seen by several Egj^jtologists in the subse- 
quent years, without realizing its significance. Finally, a study of it, accompanied 
by plates of the text, was published in 1896, by A. Pellegrini, in the Archivio stortco 
skUiano (New Series, Vol. XX, pp. 297-316). Working from this, the eminent 



56 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

A picture of this fragment from ancient Egypt stands as frontis- 
piece to this volume. Its claim to such a place of honor is unques- 
tioned, for it contains the earliest of aU known annals in the history 
of History, Fortunately, however, the illustration in this case is 
much more than a mere picture, for it offers as well the text of the 
original. At first glance this may not seem of very great interest 
to those who cannot read the hieroglyphs ; and their interest is not 
likely to be quickened when they learn that even Egyptologists do 
not quite agree as to the meaning of parts of the text. But a very 
little study of the original, in the Ught of the clues offered below, 
will enable any one, even if he has never read a hieroglyph before, 
to puzzle out the way in which it was written and even some sections 
of the text. There can be few more interesting puzzles for the 
student of history. 

At the top of the stone there is a simple row of oblong spaces, 
with relatively few signs in them. The low&r section of each of 
these furnishes the clue to their meaning, for it contains the sign 
for the king of lower Egypt, a figure wearing the red crown and 
holding one of the royal insignia, the flaU. Consequently, each 
symbol in the space above must be the name of a king. This 
row, therefore, is the list of the names of early kings of lower Egypt, 
of whose reigns apparently nothing had come down to the scribes 

French Egyptologist, E. Naville, interpreted the document as a "sort of calendar 
containing donations made by a certain number of kings of ancient Egypt and the 
indication of the feasts to be celebrated." (Les plus anciens monuments egyptiens, in 
G. Maspero's Recueil de travaux relatifs d la philologie et d Varcheologie egyptiennes et 
assyriennes, Vol. XXI (1899), pp. 112 sq.) In 1899, however, Naville visited Palermo 
and collated the text, publishing the results — with plates — in 1903, in the same 
series (Vol. XXV, or Vol. IX of the new series). There his conclusion was that it was 
a fragment of religious annals, probably drawn up by the priests of Heliopolis, "of 
which the chronology, at least in the first part, appears to depend upon the periods 
or cycles which do not correspond with the reigns of the kings" (p. 81). Meanwhile 
an even more detailed study had been undertaken by the German scholars H. Schafer, 
L. Borchardt and K. Sethe, the general conclusions of which appeared in 1902 under 
the title Ein Brtichstiick altdgyptischer Annalen, in the Abkandlungen d«r konigliclien 
preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosophische und historische Classe), for 
1902, with excellent photographic plates of the original. J. H. Breasted's translation, 
in Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. I, pp. 51-72, is based mainly upon Schafer's text. 
A photographic plate of the front face of the stone is also given in Breasted's History 
of Egypt, facing p. 46. 

The present text is drawn from Breasted's and Schafer's, rearranged somewhat 
for purposes of clarity. 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS , 57 

of the fifth dynasty but the royal names themselves. In any case, 
no events are recorded. It should be noted here that these, like 
all Egyptian hieroglyphs, are to be read from right to left. 

With the second row or series, however, one comes upon entirely 
different data. The dividing lines, curling over at the top, are 
themselves the hieroglyphic signs of palms, signifying years. If 
one looks carefully one can see a short cross-mark on each one, 
about three quarters of the way up the stem, which definitely 
establishes their meaning.^ But in a few instances the line is also 
run straight up, through the intervening long parallel space, the 
series above. These long straight lines are taken to indicate the 
close of reigns, and are accompanied by some specific reckoning, 
as may very well be seen by glancing a moment at the spaces on 
each side of the first one. On the right of it one can easily dis- 
tinguish six new-moons, one above the other, which mean six months, 
and a circle representing the sun and seven strokes, which indicate 
seven days. On the other side of the vertical line one sees four 
months and thirteen days, — the symbol for ten being the two 
strokes joined at the top instead of crossed as in Roman counting. 
Consequently, here is obviously some detail as to the time when 
the reign ceased. The name of the king is given in the long hori- 
zontal space above the yearly records, although only two such are 
visible on this side of the fragment, one at the extreme right above 
the third row, and the other at the left above the fourth row. 

The measurements in the little square below each yearly record 
are supposed to register the height of the Nile flood. The fore- 
arm represents a cubit, the other indications stand for hands and 
finger-lengths. 1 

The general character of the material here preserved is of great 
interest, however one may regard the details; for on this little 
block of stone one can see how history grows out of the thin data of 
the earliest lists. At first there are only rows of unknown kings, 
mere names, and even these of strange archaic sound .^ It is sup- 

* This was not apparent in Pellegrini's plates, but is clearly brought out in those 
of Schafer and Naville. 

^ The first line reads : -pu ; Seka ; Khayn ; Teyew ; Thesh ; etc. It should be 
recalled that the text is read from right to left. The vocalization is that adopted by 
Breasted ; the Egyptian alphabet noted only the consonants.* 



S8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

posed that the lost portion may have contained the kings of upper 
Eg)T)t or a list of the gods. Then, in the second line we come 
upon the story of a reign of the first dynasty, giving the events 
year by year. 
This first of all annals reads as follows : 

" Year i Fourth month ; thirteenth day.^ Union of the two lands. Circuit 
of the wall. 
Six cubits [the height of the Nile.] 

2 Worship of Horus.^ Festival of Desher. 

3 Birth of two children to the King of Lower Egypt. 
Four cubits, one palm. 

4 Worship of Horus ; [undeciphered]. 

5 [Plan] of the House, 'Mighty of the Gods.' Feast of Sokar. 
Five cubits, five palms, one finger. 

6 Worship of Horus. Birth of the goddess Yamet. 
Five cubits, one palm. 

7 Appearance [or coronation] of the King of Upper Egypt. 
Birth of Min. 

Five cubits. 

8 Worship of Horus. 
Birth of Anubis. 

Six cubits, one palm. 

9 First appearance of the Festival of Zet. 
Four cubits, one span. 

lo pestroyed.] " ' 

These are still mainly the data of religion, — festivals of the 
gods and scraps of divine history. The chief human activity is the 
building of temples. In the fourth line, however, we come upon 
the second dynasty, and the items recorded steadily grow more 
secular. We even come upon the regular system of the numbering 

* Date of the king's accession. The remainder of the year, which has been inter- 
rupted by the death of the last king. On this day the new king ascends the throne. 
Note the upright line dividing the reigns. The new king's name was apparently 
farther to the left, and is lost. 

2 Celebrated every two years. 

' Proceeding upon the assumption that the king's name was placed over the middle 
years of his reign, and that it would itself spread over six others, Schafer (p. 187) 
reckons that since this king's name is not yet reached in the ten years here shown, he 
must have reigned at least sixteen years more ; and the stone extended at least that 
far to the left. Similarly the king whose name occurs at the extreme right of the 
next line must have already reigned as long as the period shown here (13 years + S 
for the name, or 18 in all). 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS 59 

of the land and its resources, which may be viewed, if one so wishes, 
as the earliest trace of economic history.^ It is not until the third 
dynasty, however, on the last line of the fragment, that the annal be- 
comes at all detailed. The story depicted in the three years here 
preserved runs as follows : 

" Building of the loo-cubit dewatowe ships of meru wood, and of 60 sixteen 
[oared?] barges of the king. Hacking up of the land of the negro. Bringing 
of 7,000 Uving prisoners, and 200,000 large and small cattle. Building of the 
waU of the Southland and Northland [called] 'Houses of Snefru.' Bringing 
of 40 ships filled with cedar wood.^ 

"Making 35 houses . . . of 122 cattle. Building of a loo-cubit dewatowe 
ship of cedar wood and two i co-cubit ships of meru wood. Seventh occurrence 
of the numbering. 

"Five cubits, one palm, one finger. 

" Erection of ' Exalted is the white crown of Snefru upon the Southern Gate ' 
[and] 'Exalted is the red crown of Snefru upon the Northern Gate.'* Mak- 
ing the doors of the king's palace of cedar wood. 

" Two cubits, two palms, two and three-fourths fingers." 

The inscriptions on the reverse continue the story, through part 
of the fourth dynasty and of the three first reigns of the fifth dynasty. 
The detail is much richer here, but the condition of this face of the 
stone is so bad as to render decipherment very difficult, and the mere 
fact that the material is richer on each reign limits the scribe to 
fewer reigns. As a result interest in these sections of the annals 
hardly extends beyond Egyptologists, and further comment may 
be omitted here. 

So slight a chronicle, even if it be the first, seems hardly worth 
delaying over, were it not that we have the original text before us, 
and that its very shghtness tempts one to linger. There must have 
been many such simple, monastic products as this in the possession 
of the priests of Egypt ; but it is hardly to be wondered at that it 
needed the best of stone to preserve them, for there is little enough 
in the text itself to enforce immortahty. More human interest 

^In the third space from the right of the fourth line. It reads "Worship of 
Horns. Fourth numbering. Four cubits, two fingers." Since this numbering took 
place every other year, and this is the fourth nimibering for this king, the reign prob- 
ably began seven years earlier. 

* An expedition by sea to Lebanon. 

3 The names of two gates or parts of the palace of Snefru. Cf. J. H. Breasted, 
Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. I, p. 66 n.c. 



6o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

attaches to the records of single reigns, in which the royal scribe 
has every incentive to teU a striking story, and dress it up in all 
the detail of actuality. Such records are less ** historic" than the 
dry-as-dust chronicle we have just been examining, but they are at 
least of UveHer interest for the modern reader. 

There is a large number of these. They form the bulk of the 
great collection of Professor Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt. 
It will suffice to take as an example the most notable of these, the 
"annals" of the great monarch of the imperial period, Thothmes 
or Thutmose III.^ As the Palermo stone is the first, this is "the 
longest and most important historical inscription in Egypt." ^ It 
was written by the king's command on the walls of "the corridor 
which surrounds the granite holy of holies of the great Karnak 
temple of Amon," ^ and describes some seventeen campaigns which 
he carried on, year after year, as he maintained the sovereignty of 
Egypt over western Asia. The most noteworthy of these was 
that in which the king met and defeated the forces of Syria at 
Armageddon, or Megiddo ; and so detailed is the account of this 
exploit that modern historians are able to reconstruct the strategy 
according to the map and to follow the story day by day. The 
description of the battle itself, which has just a touch of something 
Homeric in it, is as follows : ^ 

" Then the tents of His Majesty were pitched, and orders were sent out to 
the whole army, saying, Arm yourselves, get your weapons ready, for we shall 
set out to do battle with the miserable enemy at daybreak. The king sat in 
his tent, the officers made their preparations, and the rations of the servants 
were provided. The military sentries went about crying, Be firm of heart, 
Be firm of heart. Keep watch, keep watch. Keep watch over the life of the 
king in his tent. And a report was brought to His Majesty that the country 
was quiet, and that the foot soldiers of the south and north were ready. On 
the twenty-first day of the first month of the season Shemu (March-April) 
of the twenty-third year of the reign of His Majesty, and the day of the festival 
of the new moon, which was also the anniversary of the king's coronation, at 
dawn, behold, the order was given to set the whole army in motion. His 

^ The spelling of Egyptian names is not standardized yet, owing to the absence 
of vowels in the hieroglyphs. 

* J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. II, pp. 163 sqq. It is 223 lines long. 
' Ibid., note. 

* Translation of E. A. W. Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, pp. 104- 
105. Cf. also J. H. Breasted, op. cit.. Vol. n, p. 184, Sect, 430. 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS 6i 

Majesty set out in his chariot of silver-gold, and he had girded on himself the 
weapons of battle, like Horus the Slayer, the lord of might, and he was like 
unto Menthu [the War-god] of Thebes, and Amen his father gave strength to 
his arms. The southern half of the army was stationed on a lull to the south 
of the stream Kina, and the northern half lay to the south-west of Megiddo. 
His Majesty was between them, and Amen was protecting him and giving 
strength to his body. His Majesty at the head of his army attacked his enemies, 
and broke their line, and when they saw that he was overwhelming them they 
broke and fled to Megiddo in a panic, leaving their horses and their gold and 
silver chariots on the field. [The fugitives] were pulled up by the people over 
the walls into the city ; now they let down their clothes by which to pull them 
up. If the soldiers of His Majesty had not devoted themselves to securing 
loot of the enemy, they would have been able to capture the city of Megiddo 
at the moment when the vUe foes from Kadesh and the vile foes from this city 
were being dragged up hmrriedly over the walls into this city ; for the terror 
of His Majesty had entered into them, and their arms dropped helplessly, and 
the serpent on his crown overthrew them." 

The scribe who thus graphically describes the flight to Megiddo 
evidently repeats a royal regret at the delay of the Egyptians to 
plunder the enemy, for he devotes the whole of the next section 
to a description of the spoil. Indeed, as Breasted remarlis, being a 
priest, he is really more interested in the booty than in the strategy, 
because the booty fell largely to the temples. Hence the annals 
as set forth "are little more than an introduction to lists of feasts 
and offerings," ^ which cover adjoining walls of the temple.^ Fortu- 
nately, however, he preserves the source of his narrative, showing 
that it was taken from the daily record kept by the secretaries of 
Thutmose III, a copy of which, made on a roll of leather, was pre- 
served in the temple of Amon.^ The temple inscription was, there- 
fore, an excerpt from a sort of royal journal, arranged and chosen 
"as a record for the future," ^ a conscious effort at current history 
in the grand style, in keeping with the theme and place. What- 
ever the daily journal of the king amounted to, the official in charge 
of it was no mean dignitary ; and by a strange chance one of them 

^ J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. II, p. i66. 

^ Ibid., p. 218. 

*Ibid., Sects. 391, 392, 433 Sect. 392, "Now all that his majesty did to this 
city [Megiddo], to that wretched foe and his wretched army was recorded on each 
day by its name, under the title of [title not deciphered]. [Then it was] recorded 
upon a roll of leather in the temple of Amon to this day." 

* Ibid., Sect. 568 ; cf. Sect. 392. 



62 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

has left in the epitaph on his tomb by Thebes an indication that it 
was he — Thaneni by name — who followed Thutmose on his cam- 
paigns and wrote the original record, to which the inscription refers.^ 
It is unnecessary here to delay long over annals of this kind. 
Their detailed study belongs to the history of Egypt rather than to 
such a survey as this. Although here and there one comes upon 
notable passages, particularly in the descriptive sections that deal 
with the administration of the realm,^ we are not yet, strictly speak- 
ing, dealing with historical literature, but with semi-religious, semi- 
biographical epitaphs, intended, like the monuments on which they 
were inscribed, to preserve the glory of the present for the future, 
not to rescue a past from oblivion. Their existence, however, made 
the latter possible so long as the hierogl5^hs could be read; and 
Herodotus shows us how the scribes and priests could profit from 
living in such pictured archives as their temples had become, as 
well as from the treasures in their keeping. So, to some extent, they 
kept the long perspective open. 

Finally, in the early third century B.C., when the history of 
Egypt was already ancient, a priest and scribe set down in Greek 
the lists of pharaohs, through all the centuries. Manetho, this one 
Egyptian historian of Egypt of whom we know, was no mean scholar. 
He shows, by comparison with the monuments now discovered, 
that he had at his disposal relatively accurate and adequate data 
for a suggestive outline without a rival in any antique narrative 

• The inscription runs as follows (J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. 
II, p. 165) : 

" I followed the Good God, Sovereign of Truth, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, 
Menkheperre (Thutmose III) ; I beheld the victories of the king which he won in 
every country. He brought the chiefs of Zahi as living prisoners to Egypt ; he cap- 
tured all their cities; he cut down their groves; no country remained. ... I re- 
corded the victories which he won in every land, putting (them) into writing according 
to the facts." 

* Note particularly the fine account of the state of Egypt under Ramses III, in 
E. A. W. Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 114; J. H. Breasted, 
Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. IV, Sect. 410. Attention might also be called to the 
famous Punt Reliefs, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. II, pp. 102 sqq. J. H. Breasted, 
A History of Egypt, pp. 274-278. A. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 510 sqq., etc. 
The richness of these records kept up to the last. For a description of Egypt imder 
the Ptolemies see The Tebtunis Papyri (2 vols., 1902-1907), edited by B. G. Grenfell 
and A. S. Hunt. 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS 63 

for the length of time it covers. Unfortunately, we can judge of 
his work only by the fragments which it suited Josephus, the Jewish 
historian, to preserve, and by the epitomes used by the Christian 
chroniclers, Julius Africanus and Eusebius.^ Judged by the latter, 
which is hardly fair, he seems to have made it his chief aim to secure 
correct lists of the pharaohs, coming like a careful mathematician 
to add up the items in the long lists now practically closed.^ In 
doing this he left a device, which Egyptologists still find of use; 
he divided the names into groups or Dynasties, — the familiar 
divisions of today .^ What we have in the Christian chronologies 
is apparently rather a reflection of their interest in Egyptian history 
than that of Manetho. The same is true of Josephus ; but fortu- 
nately it suited his purpose, in his defence of Jewish historiography, 
to quote from Manetho sufficiently to give us an idea — though only 
one — of the extent to which the work measures up to the standards 
of history. It is best to quote the opening section of Josephus' 
reference, in which he adduces Manetho to prove that the Hyksos 
were the Hebrews : * 

" Manetho was a man who was by race an Egyptian, but had made himself 
master of the Greek learning, as is very evident ; for he wrote the history of his 
own country in the Greek tongue, translating it, as he himself says, out of their 
sacred records : he also finds great fault with Herodotus for having given through 
ignorance false accounts of Egyptian affairs. Now this Manetho, in the second 
book of his Egyptian history,^ writes concerning us in the following manner. I 
shall set down his very words, as if I were producing the very man himself as a 
witness. 

" ' There was a king of ours whose name was Timaus, in whose reign it came 
to pass, I know not why, that God was displeased with us, and there came un- 
expectedly men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, who had boldness 
enough to make an expedition into our country, and easily subdued it by force 

* The fragments of Manetho are not readily accessible. The best source is I. P. 
Cory's Ancient Fragments of Phoenician, Chaldaan, Egyptian, . . . and Other Writers 
(2d ed., 1832), where text and translation are given as preserved in fragmentary form. 
Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 13. 

* Note especially the correspondence, in the main, with the famous Turin 
papyrus, a list of great importance to Egj^tologists. 

' Whether he took it over from his sources or not, we get it from him. 

* Josephus, Against Apion, Book I, Sect. 14. Cf. H. R. Hall, op. cit., pp. 13, 213, 
and the section from Josephus below, 

6 AlyvTTiaxd, the title of Manetho's work. 



64 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

without a battle. And when they had got our rulers under their power, they 
afterwards savagely burnt down our cities, and demolished the temples of the 
gods, and used aU the inhabitants in a most hostUe manner, for they slew some, 
and led the children and wives of others into slavery. At length they made 
one of themselves king, whose name was Salatis. And he lived at Memphis, i 
and made both upper and lower Egypt pay tribute, and left garrisons in placets 
that were most suitable for them. And he made the eastern parts especially 
strong, as he foresaw that the Assyrians, who had then the greatest power, 
would covet their kingdom, and invade them. And as he found in the nome 
of Sais a city very fit for his purpose (which lay east of the arm of the Nile 
near Bubastis, and with regard to a theological notion was called Auaris), he 
rebuilt it, and made it very strong by the walls he bviilt round it, and by a nu- 
merous garrison of two hundred and forty thousand armed men whom he put 
into it to keep it. There Salatis went every summer, partly to gather in his 
corn, and pay his soldiers their wages, and partly to train his armed men and 
so to awe foreigners. When he had reigned nineteen years he died. After 
him reigned another, whose name was Beon, for forty-four years. After 
him reigned another, called Apachnas, thirty-six years and seven months. 
After him Apophis reigned sixty-one years, and then Janias fifty years and 
one month. After all these reigned Assis forty-nine years and two months. 
And these six were the first rulers among them who were very desirous 
to pluck up Egypt by the roots. Their whole nation was called Hycsos, 
that is shepherd-kings ; for Hyc according to the sacred dialect denotes a king, 
as does Sos a shepherd and shepherds in the ordinary dialect, and of these is 
compounded Hycsos. But some say that these people were Arabians.' " 

From this extract, which contains the greater part of the text 
preserved by Josephus, one can judge the character of the Egyptian 
history of Manetho. It seems to have been a respectable perform- 
ance, a work of wide scholarship, extending over a comparative 
study of the rich materials that lay open to the men of the Hellenic 
age ; the kind of history one might welcome to the reference shelves 
of the great library at Alexandria. But whatever the content, the 
enterprise was apparently less Egyptian than Hellenic. 

In conclusion, it may be remarked that if the text of Manetho 
is as good as this in the part that deals with the history of the 
Hyksos, it probably reached still greater excellence in the more 
purely Egyptian theme of the great days of the Empire, for which 
ample materials were at hand. The critic of Herodotus may there- 
fore fairly claim the title of the one historian of Egypt. 

* Cy. Josephus, The Wars oj the Jews, BL I, Chap. IX, Sect 4- 



EGYPTIAN ANNALS 65 

Such, in short, is the history of History of Egypt. The student 
will find much of interest as he turns to that vast descriptive litera- 
ture which modern scholars have now deciphered. But there are 
no signs of anything comparable to their own work; no mastery 
of time perspectives and source criticism such as is now demanded 
ofjevery one who attempts to recast the ancient story. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The works of J. H. Breasted have been constantly used in this chapter. In 
addition to his well known History of Egypt (2d ed., 1909) and his shorter 
History of the Ancient Egyptians (1908), with good selected bibliography, his 
general surveys in Ancient Times (1916), and the Development of Religion and 
Thought in Ancient Egypt (191 2), the collection of historical texts, in English 
translation, Ancient Records of Egypt (5 vols., 1906-1907) contain material 
which is readily usable as illustrative of the text, by any thoughtful reader. 
The finely illustrated Reports of the Egyptian Exploration Fund should be 
referred to, if available, for the graphic quality of their texts. The History of 
Egypt by Flinders Petrie, although revised in process of pubUcation, follows 
a chronological scheme now generally not accepted. More elaborate is the 
History of Egypt by E. A. W. Budge (8 vols., 1902-1904), while the best general 
description of Egyptian society is that of A. Erman, translated as Life in 
Ancient Egypt (1894). The works of G. Maspero (also translated) contain 
much suggestive material. The articles on Egypt in the Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica are especially valuable, with good bibliographies ; and there is a valua- 
ble Introduction in Budge's elaborate Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (1920). 
But the student of historiography is indebted most to Professor Breasted. 



CHAPTER VI 

BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 

The art of writing in cuneiform — making wedge-shaped marks 
in clay by means of a reed — was developed as early as the fourth 
millennium B.C. by the people who lived in the mud flats and among 
the reedy marshes of the lower Euphrates. They were not Semites, 
like the nomads of the desert to the west, but " Sumerians," a strange 
Asiatic people, living mainly in towns and engaged already in 
business or in truck-farming where dikes secured that most fertile 
soil. History, in that part of the world, dawns for us, — since the 
rise of modern archaeology, — with the scratches of those early 
scribes, noting the sales of a merchant, the title to a plot of land 
or some such item of current business, or a religious text. For, 
not only has time preserved many a hardened lump of clay, which 
served them for book and paper ; but also, the art of writing itself 
was never lost, through all the changing civilizations which fol- 
lowed each other on the soil of Babylonia.^ Indeed it remained 
one of the fundamentals in Mesopotamian culture; an essential 
in the transaction of business and of government. From the days 
when Hammurabi dictated his despatches and had his laws in- 
scribed, to the closing of the Persian era, the little lumps of clay, 
baked and sealed, were as important instruments in carrying on 
affairs as the armies of the kings or the goods of the merchants. 
And if the devices of literacy helped to hold the Mesopotamian 
world together, they also united the centuries. Libraries preserved 
the tablets by scores and hundreds, and scholars copied the classical 
ones or those their royal patrons were interested in. In short, from 
a time so remote that it was almost as far away to the Persians as 
to us, through three millenniums at least, the people of Babylonia- 
Assyria kept producing and studying the data of history; yet 
the thing itself they never produced.^ 

* Cf. S. P. Handcock, Mesopotamian Archaciogy (1912), Chap. IV. 

* Berossos had Greek antecedents. 

66 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 67 

The history of History in Babylonia is very similar to that in 
Egypt, so similar that we do not need to delay long over the de- 
tails. But there is an added significance in the failure of Babylonia ; 
for it did develop the two elements which are the essentials in his- 
torical production : a curiosity about the origin of things which 
resulted in a mythical literature that has been of lasting importance 
in religion ; and a care for the texts of the past, which is the first 
step toward historical criticism. Had criticism supervened, we 
should have had genuine history. But criticism presupposes 
skepticism ; and in Babylon as in Egypt, reUgion — or super- 
stition — blocked the way to science. 

The myths of Babylon have a personal interest for us, not so 
much on account of what they contain as on account of their subse- 
quent history. Preserved and transformed by the Jews, they be- 
came the basis of our own story of the origin of things ; and when 
the originals were found and deciphered, only a few years ago, the 
controversies which they aroused passed the frontiers of either 
science or religion, as the very foundations of biblical faith seemed 
shaken. Here, however, we have no theological problems to solve, 
and must limit ourselves to considering them in their own time and 
setting, although it must be admitted that, were it not for their 
later use, we should hardly be tempted to do so, seeing that we 
passed by in silence the Pyramid texts of Egypt, with a content 
intrinsically not less significant.^ But the coming of Osiris, however 
much it contributed to that process of intricate and subtle syncretism 
which tinged with wistful hope and moral purpose the Greco- 
Roman world in early Christian days, did not enter into the fabric 
of Jewish belief as did the Babylonian stories of Creation and the 
Flood, and so its conscious influence in western thought is not to be 
compared with theirs. 

The myth of Creation ^ as preserved on seven tablets, is long 
and involved, with much repetition ; but the parts of interest for 

* See J. H. Breasted's analysis in Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient 
Egypt. 

^ On these Babylonian myths see R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old 
Testament (191 2) with bibliographies. Of the works mentioned there see especially 
those of L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation (2 vols., 1902). 



68 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

comparison with the story in Genesis are only a few lines. It 
begins with the creation of the gods themselves. 

"When above the heaven was not named, 
And beneath the earth bore no name, 
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them, 
And Mummu and Tiamat, the mother of them all, — 
Their waters were mingled together, 
And no field was formed, no marsh seen, 
When no one of the gods had been called into being. 
And none bore a name, and no destinies [were fixed], 
Then were created the gods in the midst of [heavenl." 



1 



Then comes a struggle between Tiamat, dragon of darkness and 
disorder, and the champion of the parent god Anshar, who was 
Ea when the tale was told in Eridu, Marduk when it was told in 
Babylon. The text rises to fine epic quality as it describes the hero 
advancing to the combat. 

"He made ready the bow, appointed it as his weapon, 
He seized a spear, he fastened . . . 
He raised the club, in his right hand he grasped it, 
The bow and the quiver he hung at his side. 
He put the lightning in front of him, 
With flaming fire he filled his body." * 

It was only after Tiamat's body was cut, so that one half made 
heaven and the other half the earth, that Marduk determined to 
create plants and animals, and man.^ 

"When Marduk heard the word of the gods. 
His heart moved him and he devised a cunning plan. 
He opened his mouth and unto Ea he spoke, 

That which he had conceived in his heart, he made known unto him: 
' My blood will I take and bone will I fashion, 
I shall make man that man may ... 
I shall create man who shall inhabit the earth, 
Let the worship of the gods be established, let their shrines be built.'" 

There is also the legend of a certain Adapa — or perhaps 
Adamu * — who is cautioned by his father Ea not to eat or drink 

1 R. W. Rogers, Cuneiftirm Parallels to the Old Testament, p. 3. 

' Ibid., p. 26. 

3 Ibid., Sixth tablet, U. 1-8, p. 36. 

* Ibid., pp. 67 sq. 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 69 

of the food the gods will provide him, and by obeying — not by 
disobeying — he misses eternal life. This Adam is not a first man 
but a god who breaks the wings of the south wind. It is a pretty 
story, even in the form in which we have it. 

But the great myth-epic of Babylonia was that of Gilgamesh 
and the Flood. It is " the most beautiful, most impressive and most 
extensive poem which has been preserved to us of the literature 
of the ancient Babylonians." ^ The text we have was written on 
twelve large closely written tablets, some of which are badly broken ; 
and was copied for a royal Assyrian hbrary, that of Ashur-bani-pal 
(668-626 B.C.), from some old Babylonian sources, such as have 
been in part preserved as well from the first Babylonian dynasty, 
of about 2000 B.C. Gilgamesh was the ruler of one of the city-states, 
Erech or Uruk, who wandered to that mysterious country beyond 
the western sea, where he learned from the lips of Noah himself, — 
whose Babylonian name was Ut-napishtim, — the story of the 
Flood. The epic which preserves this tale is a strange mixture of 
sublime Oriental poetry, rich with imagery, swift and powerful 
in narration, with sections of commonplace details as to the 
measurements of the ark and of the business routine of its 
management. The more prosy account in Genesis is here em- 
bedded in a poem that rivals the Hellenic or Germanic epics. 
Evidently a real event had drifted over into the realm of legend 
and romance. 

The myths of Babylonia reflect, though dimly, real conditions 
and events, but they lack the secular tone of the Homeric epics. 
They belong with religion rather than forming a part of the prelimi- 
nary processes of history. Myths of origin or of half-fabulous heroes 
have in them the data of history ; but they can seldom reveal their 
historical qualities to the people who produce them; for that re- 
quires an attitude of unbelief on the part of the listener, sufl&cient 
to enable him to apply the ruthless surgery of criticism. And the 
age that applies such methods to discover the truth must know how 
to use the scalpel or it simply kills the whole process, so that myth 

^ Ibid., p. 80 (with bibliography) . There is a detailed discussion in the article 
Gilgamesh by M. Jastrow in the Encyclopcsdia Britannica. Gilgamesh himself re- 
sembles in several ways the Greek Heracles^ Vide L. R. Farnell, Greece and Babylon 
(1911). 



70 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

and fact alike disappear. It was not until the present that readers 
of the ancient texts could so discriminate between fact and super- 
stition in the early tales of Babylonia ; the scholars of later Baby- 
lonian ages took them as they were. 

This scholarship did produce another set of sources, however, 
which brings one to the very threshold of historical literature. No 
civilization ever produced more codification of documents. The 
code of Hammurabi was but one of several, and recent discoveries 
carry the procedure back to Sumerian beginnings.^ The data of 
religion were codified as well as those of law; vast literatures of 
omens and charms grew up for the conduct of life in that border- 
land of luck and morals which was the field of Babylonian magic 
and religion. Mathematics and a study of the stars finally brought 
the content to the verge of science, through astrology, and so left 
a doubly deep impress upon the ancient world.^ But the interest 
in this work of codifying and passing along the ancient lore was in 
the application for the future, as the codifying of laws was for the 
present. The interest in the past was not destined to produce as 
notable a contribution, mere lists of names and dates rising at last 
to the dignity of chronicles. 

The earliest records are lists of the names of kings. These are 
of great importance for the archaeologist, and two such lists, known 
as the Babylonian King Lists A and B,^ copied out in the late 
Babylonian period, show how these could persist in their mud 
tablets for centuries, to be available for the scholars of the last 
age of Babylon ; since similar Sumerian lists have also been dis- 
covered, enabling comparison. This shows that as early as the 
days when Hammurabi was inscribing his code, scribes were also 
ensuring an accurate statement of the succession of rulers. Date- 

1 Cf. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (s vols., 1884-1902 ; 3d ed., Vol. I, 1910- 
i9i3)> (3d ed.), Vol. I, Sects. 313 sq. The code of Hammurabi has been published 
several times in English translation. Cf. R. W. Rogers' Parallels, pp. 398 sqq., and 
R. F. Harper's The Code of Hammurabi (1904). 

2 Vide J. T. Shotwell, The Discovery of Time, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psy- 
chology and Scientific Methods, Vol. XII (1915), Nos. 8, 10, 12, as above; Franz 
Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (tr. 191 1), and Astrology and Re- 
ligion among the Greeks and Romans (1912). 

' Cf. R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament, p. 201 ; History of 
Babylonia and Assyria, Vol. I, p. 470. 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 71 

lists were also kept, in order to place the years, the Babylonian 
way, by events or names.^ 

When we turn from these meagre lists to inscriptions recording 
events, we find, as in Eg5^t, that the notable ones deal with current 
affairs, for the most part glorifying a single monarch. A common 
device is to present the narrative either as coming from the king 
himself or from a god — a sure mark of authenticity combined 
thriftily with devotion ! The chronicle grows out of these naturally, 
but the growth in Babylonia was slight enough. The monastic 
hand is traceable throughout. Thin dynastic narratives have been 
found, which carry a continuous story from reign to reign — or 
would if the fragments were less fragmentary .^ There are some 
that go back to recite the exploits of Sargon I, the Semitic Charle- 
magne of this monastic literature, whose legendary figure loomed 
large through later ages, and Naram-Sin his son.^ But after all, 
we have only a few lines at best. 

The closing chapter of Babylonian history is, strangely enough, 
a chapter of our survey. For the last king, Nabonidus,^ was him- 
self, if not a royal historian, at least an archaeologist. While the 
Persians under Cyrus were gathering in the nations along the north 
and making ready to strike at the old centre of civilization there, 
the king of Babylonia was excavating the remains of its distant 
past as he sunk the foundations for his own new temples through the 
debris of the city where they stood. Although his son Belshazzar, 
to whom the administration of the realm fell, could see the hand- 
writing on the wall, Nabonidus was not interested in war, but was 
recording with a scholar's enthusiasm such facts as that he had 
unearthed a foundation stone of Naram-Sin "which no king before 
me had seen for 3200 years." ^ To these archaeological interests of 
Nabonidus the modern archaeologist is deeply indebted; yet the 
contribution is rather in the field of chronology than of history 
proper. The scribes of Nabonidus searched the libraries to be 

* Vide supra, Chap. IV. Cf. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertunts (3d ed.), Vol. I, 
Sect. 323. 

* Vide L. W. King, Chronicles Concerning Early Babylonian Kings (2 vols., 1907). 
8 Cf. L. W. King, ibid.; R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. II, p. 25 ; Parallels, p. 203. 

* Cf. R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. I, p. 493 ; Parallels, p. 373. Nabonidus' reign 
was from 555 to 539 b.c. 

•• C/. R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. I, p. 494, with references. 



72 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

able to place the kings whose inscriptions he found in their proper 
places in the lists, and to calculate the stretch of years before their 
time. But gods and men share honors alike, in this careful though 
undiscriminating survey of what were already ancient times in 
Babylonia. 

The contribution of Assyria to historiography is so closely linked 
with that of Babylonia that little is left to be said concerning it. 
Like the meagre lists of Babylonia, we find here lists of those officers 
whose names gave the name to the year, arranged in an Eponym 
Canon} On some of these, as on the calendar tablets of the mediaeval 
monasteries, they jotted down short notes of events in the year, 
especially military expeditions, which were to Assyria what temple- 
building was to Babylonia. More significant were synchronistic 
chronicles, giving the parallel events in Babylonia and Assyria. 
All of these are of great importance to modern scholars, but are 
slight enough in themselves. 

The chief approach to history in Assyria is again the boastful 
record of single reigns, set forth for the glory of the king. Some 
of these are detailed and graphic, and they leave us living pictures 
of Sennacherib, Tiglath-Pileser, Shelmaneser and Esarhaddon,^ who 
are now as real to us as the figures of classical history. There is a 
persistent minor note which runs through these proud boastful 
assertions of the royal power, which should not escape the modem 
reader. For, however sure the king may be of his control of the 
world of his own day, he is uneasy about the future. It is to safe- 
guard that, that "memorial stones" are inscribed for the coming 
generations. Yet even the inscriptions may not be safe at the 
hands of one's descendants. The thought is disquieting ; and the 
kings either plead with or threaten those who are to come after. 
There have been few more ruthless criminals in the world's history 
than Ashur-nasir-pal III,^ the Assyrian Tamerlane, and few annals 
from the monuments equal his account of his conquests which es- 
tablished the Assyrian power in western Asia. Yet his grasp upon 
the future is feeble enough ; he pleads as follows : 

» Vide supra, Chap. IV. 

2 For Esarhaddon see E. A. W. Budge, The History of Esarkaddon (1880). 
» He reigned from 885 to 860 B.C. Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the 
Near East, p. 445. 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 73 

". . . O thou future prince among the kings, my sons . . . thou shalt not 
blot out my name which is inscribed (hereon), but thy own name thou shalt 
inscribe beside my name." ^ 

But the records of the Assyrian kings were hardly safe if left to the 
kindly offices of their successors. Curses were more effective, as 
Shakespeare, too, thought ; and so the chronicle would close with a 
good round formula, the power of which must have been con- 
siderable in the land of omens and augural science. The curse of 
Ashur-nasir-pal presents so realistic a picture of what may happen 
to royal records that it may be quoted at length : 

"Whosoever shall not act according to the word of this, my memorial stone, 
and shall alter the words of my inscription, or shall destroy this image or con- 
ceal it, or shall smear it with grease or bury it in the earth, or bxirn it in the 
fire, or cast it into the water, or place it so that beasts may tread on it or cattle 
pass over it, or prevent men from beholding and reading the words of my in- 
scription, or shall do violence to my memorial stone so that none may behold 
it ; or, because of these curses shall send a foe ... or a prisoner or any living 
creature and cause him to take it, and he shall deface it or scrape it or change 
it into a foreign tongue, or he shall turn his mind ... to alter the words — 
whether he be scribe or soothsayer or any other man — ... and he shall say 
*I know him not ! Surely during his own rule men slew him and overthrew 
his image and destroyed it and altered the words of his mouth,' . . . may 
Ashur, the great lord, the god of Assyria, the lord of destinies, curse his destiny, 
and may he alter his deeds and utter an evil curse that the foundation of his 
kingdom may be rooted up. . . ." ' 

With such an appeal to the guardianship of the gods and the 
fears of men one might leave the record to the keeping of history. 
It was all one could do. Yet it was not enough. The history of 
the Assyrians was soon lost. Already by the time of Xenophon, 
no one could tell the true meaning of the nameless mounds in which 
lay embedded all that was left of the splendor of Nineveh.^ The 
Greeks knew something of Babylon, but almost nothing of Assyria.^ 

*C/. E. A. W. Budge and L. W. King, The Annals of the Kings of Assyria (1902), 
Vol. I, p. 165. See the similar plea of Tiglath-Pileser I, ibid., p. 104. Such formulae 
are common in the inscriptions. 

* Ibid.^ Vol. I, pp. 249 sqq. 

' Anabasis, Bk. Ill, Chap. IV, Sects, i-io. He marched past in 401 B.C. 

* It is striking that the case is somewhat reversed now ; we know the history of 
Assyria better than that of more ancient Babylonia. As E. Meyer remarks, Gesckichte 
des Altertums (3d ed.). Vol. I, Sects. 315-316, the sudden destruction of Nineveh 



74 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

It remains only to note the attempt made under the last of the 
great Assyrian kings, Ashur-bani-pal (668-626 B.C.), to improve 
upon his predecessors and to give to his inscriptions something of 
the character of history. The king himself was not only a famous 
conqueror but a patron of learning, and found time from his wars 
to bring together a vast library; some 20,000 tablets remain to 
show the activity of his scribes, who copied the great cuneiform 
heritage.^ His own inscriptions forsake the terse phrases of the 
older style for an essay in history in the grand style, the finest product 
Assyria could yield. But the substance remains much the same; 
and the attempt to rearrange events in some topic order instead of 
following the strict chronological sequence, leads to confusion and 
loses more than it gains 

The Persians continued the regal tradition of Baby Ionia- Assyria, 
and one of the greatest records in the world is that which, on the 
almost inaccessible precipice of Behistun, recites the deeds and 
exalts the glory of Darius the Great to the untenanted desert! 
But though the desert roads are unfrequented now, this Gibraltar- 
like rock stands facing the one great highway between central Asia 
and Mesopotamia, and there, where the traffic between East and 
West would pass, on the bare face of the cliff, three hundred feet 
above the roadway, were sculptured the figures of Darius and the 
"rebels" he overthrew, and the long inscription* describing the 
events of his reign. ^ 

The inscription was destined to do more than Darius could have 
imagined, for by means of it the key was found which unlocked 

was fortunate, for the remains were at once buried and so preserved, while Babylon 
was repeatedly despoiled. 

*C/. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, loc. cit.; R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. II, 
pp. 427 sgg. H. R. Hall, Ancient History, p. 500. To it we owe the preservation of 
such sources for Babylonian history as the Sargon chronicle, etc. 

2 Professor A. V. W. Jackson, who visited Behistun in 1903, thus describes it in 
Persia, Past and Present (1906), p. 187: "With all I had read about Behistun, with 
all I had heard about it, and with all I had thought about it beforehand, I had not the 
faintest conception of the Gibraltar-like impressiveness of this rugged crag until I 
came into its Titan presence and felt the grandeur of its sombre shadow and towering 
frame. Snow and clouds capped its peaks at the time, and birds innumerable were 
soaring around it aloft or hovering near the place where the inscriptions were hewn 
into the rock. There, as I looked upward, I could see, more than three hundred feet 
above the ground, the bas-relief of the great B^ng Darius." 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 75 

cuneiform to modern scholars. The text had been recorded in Per- 
sian, Susian and Babylonian, and when, in 1833-183 7 (and again 
in 1844), Sir Henry Rawlinson, then a young ofl&cer in the Indian 
service, at the risk of his life clambered up the rock and copied the 
inscription, he was able (later) to translate it as well. In such 
dramatic fashion, the Behistun inscription became the Rosetta 
stone of the cuneiform texts. ^ 

The inscription of Darius is divided into some fifty or sixty 
sections, each devoted to a different subject and each beginning 
"Thus saith Darius the king." The first ten give the genealogy 
of Darius and a description of the provinces of his empire. With 
the tenth section the history begins, and it may be quoted to give 
an idea of how the succeeding ones run : 

" (Thus) saith Darius, the king : This is what was done by me after I be- 
came king. He who was named Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, one of our race, 
was king here before me. That Cambyses had a brother, Smerdis by name, 
of the same mother and the same father as Cambyses. Afterwards Cambyses 
slew this Smerdis. When Cambyses slew Smerdis, it was not known unto 
people that Smerdis was slain. Thereupon Cambyses went into Egypt. When 
Cambyses had departed into Egypt, the people became hostile, and the lie mul- 
tipUed in the land, even in Persia, as in Media, and in the other provinces." ^ 

The inscription closes with an appeal to posterity, similar to 
those of the other regal chronicles described above : 

" If thou seest this inscription beside these sculptures and destroyest 
them not, but guardest them as thou hvest, then shall Auramazda be thy 
friend and thy race shalt thou perpetuate, and thou shalt live a long life and 
whatsoever thou desirest to do shall Auramazda cause to prosper." ^ 

But if not, then the curse of Auramazda is invoked on the evil-doer. 
Fortunately the curse has not been tested by the vandal ; the texts 
are too inaccessible. 

Like Egypt, though, the Empires of Asia were touched into new 
life when the Greeks invaded them, either as travellers or as bene- 

^ See the fine volume, with notable illustrations, The Sculptures and Inscription 
of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun, published anonymously by the British 
Museum (1907). The authors are L. W. King and R. C. Thompson, who prepared a 
new copy by careful work on the spot. Cf. R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. I, p. 80. 

» L. W. King and R. C. Thompson, op. cit., Persian text, pp. 6-7. 

* Ibid., Susian text, p. 149. 



76 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

ficiaries of the Macedonian conquest. The earliest of these wander- 
ers \jhose record of his impressions we possess was no less a personage 
than Herodotus, the " Father of History " himself.^ But the story of 
Assyria-Babylonia accepted in the ancient world was largely drawn 
from that of Ctesias of Cnidus, who lived from 415 to 398 B.C. as 
personal physician to the king of Persia, Artaxerxes Mnemon. His 
Persica was a magnum opus of twenty-three books, the first three of 
which dealt with the ancient kingdoms, the fourth with their over- 
throw by the Medes, and the remaining nineteen with Persian his- 
tory .^ This uncritical mixture of invention and credulity, utterly 
unreliable, has not even the merits of a romance, since it imposed 
itself as history upon the sober chronographers of Alexandria.^ 

Berossos, a Babylonian priest of Bel, who wrote his three 
books, Babylonica or Caldaica, about 280 B.C., was better equipped 
to open up to the Hellenic world the mysteries of his home-land.* 
He could know the sources in the original. This text is lost, 
but such extracts as have been preserved enable us to form a 
very fair idea of it.^ There were these different parts: first a 
mythical, legendary section dealing with the period from Creation 
to the Flood ; then a thin list of names of kings from the Flood 
to Nabonassar with no account of their deeds; and a closing 
section of detailed narrative of the more recent history. The 
whole work was prefaced with a description of the country ap- 
parently in the manner of Herodotus.^ The myth with which his 

^ As Herodotus reproduced Hecataeus in part, we have some trace of his investi- 
gations as well. 

^ Cf. C. Wachsmuth, Einleitung in das Studiutn der alten Geschichte (1895), pp. 367 
sqq.; R. W. Rogers, History, Vol. I, p. 391. It was still complete in the ninth century 
A.D. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica (Bk. II, Chaps. I-XXXIV), repeats the 
stories about the Assyrian part. 

' A. H. Sayce, The Ancient Empires of the East (1900), p. xxiii, took occasion to 
say a good word for him, however, while criticising Herodotus. 

* Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 14 ; R. W. Rogers, His- 
tory, Vol. I, p. 388, Parallels, pp. 76 sqq. (for translation of a section). 

6 The extracts, as in the case of Manetho, were preserved by Josephus, Against 
Apion, Bk. I, Sects. 19 sqq., and Eusebius at the opening of his Chronicorum Liber 
Primus, quoting Alexander Polyhistor, an antiquarian of the time of Sulla. Texts 
and translation by I. P. Cory in Ancient Fragments of Phcenician, Chaldaan, 
Egyptian, . . . and Other Writers. 

« Eusebius {op. cit., Bk. I, Chap. H) summarizes this as follows: "And first, he 
says, that the land of the Babylonians lies on the river Tigris and that the Euphrates 



BABYLONIAN, ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN RECORDS 77 

narrative begins, that of the gift of the arts of civilization to man 
by a sea-monster Oannes, is taken by modern historians to contain 
a possible dim reflection of a tradition that the Sumerians, that 
earliest of all the people of Babylonia, came from India by way of 
the Persian Gulf.^ On the chance that it may be so, and that it is, 
therefore, the farthest echo of historical fact that has reached 
our ears from beyond the frontiers of knowledge, we may quote the 
grotesque narrative as Eusebius has preserved it : 

"In the first years, so he (Berossos) says, there appeared from the Red 
Sea, even there in the midst of the territory of the Babylonians, a terrible mon- 
ster, whose name was Oannes. . . . And of this animal he says that it was in 
daily intercourse with men, never touching food ; and it taught men writing 
and the manifold arts, the building of cities and the founding of temples ; also 
the giving of law and the terms of boundaries and divisions. Also it is said to 
have taught men the harvest of wheat and fruit ; and indeed everything which 
is of use to the life of organized society was delivered by him to man. And 
since that time nothing more has been invented by anyone.^ 

" And at sunset the monster Oannes plunged again into the sea, and passed 
the night on the high sea. So that it led a double life to a certain extent. And 
later other similar monsters appeared which he says he treats of in the book of 
the kings. And Oannes, he says, has written the following account of the crea- 
tion and the commonwealth and bestowed speech and aptness to the arts upon 
man." ' 

That Berossos could turn from such luxuriant Oriental myths as 
this to a mere list of names in his historical section argues well for 
his sense of scholarship if not for his critical ability. For obviously 
he was following his sources closely, a fact which recent investi- 
gations tend to corroborate. But his antique editor took another 
point of view. The inference he drew was that one who knew so 
little in one section must be an unreliable witness in another ! The 

flows through the midst of it, and the land brings forth of itself, wheat, barley, lentils, 
millet, and sesame. And in the swamps and reeds of the river were certain edible 
roots called gong, which have the strength of barley-bread. Dates and apples and 
all kinds of other fruits grow there too, and there are fishes and fowls and birds of 
fields and swamps. The land has also arid and barren territories (the Arabian) ; and 
opposite the land of Arabia, it is mountainous and fruitful. But in Babylon an enor- 
mous mass of strange people was settled, in the land of the Chaldaeans, and they lived 
in licentiousness, like the unreasoning animals and the wild cattle." 

* Cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 174, note. 

* Note this magnificent statement of the static, conservative idea. 

* Eusebius, Chronicorum Liber Primus, Chap. II. 



78 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

comment of Eusebius shows what temptations to give a little more 
than full measure lay in the path of the antique historian ! ^ 

It would be only fair to Berossos to quote, in contrast to these 
legendary and chronological sections, something from the later 
part, where he is on firmer historical ground. Josephus gives us 
a long enough excerpt of this to show that here it rose to something 
of the dignity of genuine history .^ There is a description of Babylon 
in its last splendor, with the "hanging gardens" and the other feats 
of engineering, and a criticism of the mistakes of Greek historians 
who held to the myth of the founding of Babylon by Semiramis. 
But this is about all we have ; and in view of the relatively small 
fragment of the whole history which has been preserved, we are 
hardly justified in delaying further over it. And with Berossos we 
quit Babylonia. 

^ Cf. Eusebius, ibid.: "If they (the Chaldaeans) had only told of deeds and works 
accomplished by the long succession of rulers in these thousands of years, corresponding 
to the vast extent of time, one might properly hesitate whether there were not some 
truth in the matter after all. But since they have merely assigned to the rule of 
those ten men so many myriads of years, who is there who should not regard such 
indiscriminate accounts as myths." 

* Josephus, Against Apion, Bk. I, Sects. 19-20. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The most useful guides to the non-technical student of Babylonian-Assyrian 
history are those of R. W. Rogers referred to above, his Cuneiform Parallels 
to the Old Testament (1912), and his History of Babylonia and Assyria (2 vols., 
1915), in which a full account is given of the progress of modern scholarship and 
a helpful and adequate bibliographical apparatus. The works of Morris 
Jastrow, especially The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria (191 5) should also 
be consulted, as well as those of L. W. King. The articles by these two scholars 
in the Encyclopedia Britannica are good short surveys. Good discussions occm: 
in H. R. Hall's Ancient History of the Near East (1913), to which constant refer- 
ence has been made in the text. References to the great collections of the 
original texts will be found in these works, but mention should be made of the 
remarkable series edited by H. V. Hilprecht, The Babylonian Expedition of the 
University of Pennsylvania (i 893-19 n), continued as Publications of the 
Babylonian Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum. 



SECTION II 
JEWISH HISTORY 

CHAPTER Vn 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS HISTORY 

When we turn from these poor and thin records of the great 
empires of the East to the history of that little branch of the Semites 
which clung to the perilous post on the land-bridge between the 
Euphrates and the Nile, the Hebrews of Palestine, we are struck 
at once with the comparative wealth of its national annals. In 
contrast with the product of Egypt or Babylonia, the Bible stands 
out as an epoch-making achievement. A composite work of many 
centuries, filled with much that the historian rejects, it yet em- 
bodies the first historical work of genuinely national importance 
which has come down to us.* Higher criticism has robbed it of its 
unique distinction as a special revelation of Jehovah, denied the 
historicity of its account of the Creation and destroyed the claim 
of the legends of the patriarchs to be regarded as authentic; the 
great name of Moses disappears as the author of the Pentateuch, 
and that of David from the book of Psalms ; the story of Joseph 
becomes a romance, the Decalogue a statement of late prophetic 
ideals ; the old familiar books dissolve into their component parts, 

* The treatment of the historical records of the Jews is here taken up from the 
standpoint of the completed output, the Bible as we now have it. This is mainly 
for the sake of clarity. A more historical treatment would be to begin with the ele- 
ments as thev existed in the earliest days and bring the story down, as it really hap- 
pened, instead of going backwards, analyzing the completed text. This historical 
treatment has been admirably followed out by H. Schmidt in his booklet in the Re- 
Ugionsgeschichtliche Volksbiicher series (Series II, No. i6), entitled Die Geschichts- 
schreibung im aiten Testament (191 1). The volume by Julius Bewer in this series 
(of the Records of Civilization, to be published shortly), The Literature of the Old 
Testament in its Historical Development, should be at hand to develop, and perhaps 
to correct, the points touched upon in these pages. 

79 



8o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

written at different times and by different hands. In short, a 
national record, of varying value and varying historical reUability, 
has replaced the Bible of the churches, of stately uniform text and 
unvarying authority. Nevertheless, it is possible to claim that, 
judged as historical material, the Old Testament stands higher to- 
day than when its text was protected with the sanctions of rehgion. 
For it was not until its exceptional and sacred character was denied 
that it could be appraised by the standards of history and its value 
as a repository of national, if not of world, story be fairly ap- 
preciated. So long as the distinction existed which exalted the 
Jewish scriptures as sacred inspiration above the rest of the world's 
literature, the historicity of the Old Testament had to be accepted 
on a different basis from that of other narratives. Sacred and pro- 
fane history are by nature incomparable ; for the author of the one 
is God, of the other, man. Now, no higher tribute could be paid 
to the historical worth of the Old Testament than the statement 
that, when considered upon the profane basis of human authorship, 
it still remains one of the greatest products in the history of History, 
a record of national' tradition, outlook and aspiration, produced by 
a poor, harassed, semi-barbarous people torn by feud and swept 
by conquest, which yet retains the undying charm of genuine art 
and the universal appeal of human interest. That is not to say 
that, viewed from the standpoint of modern history, it is a remark- 
able performance; for while it embodies some passages of great 
power and lasting beauty, the narrative is often awkward, self- 
contradictory, clogged with genealogies and overloaded with 
minute and tiresome ceremonial instructions. The historian, how- 
ever, should not judge it from the modem standpoint. He should 
not compare Genesis with Ranke, but with the product of Egypt 
and Assyria. Judged in the light of its own time the literature 
of the Jews is unique in scope as in power. It is the social ex- 
pression of a people moving up from barbarism to civilization ; and 
if its pastoral tales reveal here and there the savage Bedouin and 
its courtly chronicle is touched with the exaggerations of hero- 
myths, if its priestly reforms and prophetic morals are allowed to 
obscure the currents of more worldly politics, all of these elements 
but mirror a changing outlook of different ages in the evolution of 
one of the most highly gifted peoples of the ancient world. 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS HISTORY 8i 

The trouble has been that this mass of literary remains has been 
taken for something other than what it was. The rabbis came to 
view its last editorial revision as the authoritative and divine state- 
ment of the whole world's story, and the theologians of succeeding 
centuries accepted their outlook with unquestioning faith. In 
short, the Bible became more and more unhistorical as it became 
more and more sacred. Higher criticism, viewing the texts his- 
torically, at last reveals their setting in their own time and place, 
and presents them as a national product instead of a record of 
creation in the words of the Creator. For the former it is adequate, 
for the latter no doctrinal apologies could save it from the shafts 
of ridicule. 

The most important service, however, which higher criticism 
has rendered the Old Testament, is that it has allowed us to dis- 
tinguish between the validity of different parts, to detect the naive 
folk-tale in which Jahveh and the patriarchs meet at old hill- 
sanctuaries and the late priestly narrative reconstructing the whole 
in terms of the temple at Jerusalem. The finer passages are no 
longer involved in the fate of the rest. It is therefore possible to 
appreciate the genuine achievements of the chief historians of 
Israel for the first time. 

The Bible, as the name implies, is a collection of books.* It is 
not a single, consistent whole, but a miscellany. The first step in 
understanding it is to realize that it comprises the literary heritage 
of a nation, — all that has survived, or nearly so, of an antiquity 
of many centuries. It includes legends from the camps of nomads, 
borrowings from Babylon, Egypt and Persia, annals of royal courts, 
laws, poems and prophecies. It preserves these, not in their 
original form, but in fragments recast or reset to suit the purpose 
of a later day. For, down to the very close of Jewish history the 
process of editing and re-editing this huge, conglomerate mass went 
on. Moreover, as the editors were theologians rather than his- 
torians, the result was as bad for history as it has been accounted 
good for theology, and the historian today has to undo most of 

* /3£/3Xos was the inner bark of the papyras, hence applied to the paper made from 
it. From this it was applied to the book made of the paper. /3i/3X(a (bible) is the 
plural of Pi^Tdov, a diminutive of ^i^Xos. Vide supra, Chap. III. 



82 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

their work to reach the various layers of sources upon which they 
built the Bible as we know it, — sources which represent the real 
heritage of the ancient days. One must dig for these beneath the 
present text, just as one digs the soil of ancient cities for the streets 
and walls of former times. For the literary and the material monu- 
ments of a people share a somewhat similar fate. The Bible of to- 
day stands like some modern Athens or Rome upon the fragments 
of its former elements. The legends and laws of the early time 
are buried deep beneath the structures of later ages. More than 
once they have been burned over by conquest and civil feud, and, 
when restored, built up to suit new plans and different purposes. 
Today, however, the historian can lay bare the various strata, re- 
cover the ancient landmarks, and from their remains reconstruct 
in imagination each successive stage of the story. So, like the 
archaeologist, who sees not merely the city of the present or of its 
classic splendor, but the cities of every era in the long, eventful 
past, the student of higher criticism can now trace the process 
of the formation of the Bible from the crude, primitive beginnings 
— the tenements of barbarian thought — to the period when its 
contents were laid out in the blocks of books as we have them now, 
faced with the marble of unchangeable text, and around them all 
were flung the sacred walls of canonicity. The walls are now 
breached ; and the exploring scientist can wander at will through 
the historic texts, unhampered by any superstitious fears. We 
shall follow him — hurriedly. 

There was once a historian of our southern states who prepared 
himself for his life's work in the highly controversial period of the 
Civil War by taking a doctorate in mediaeval history. In an alien 
field, where his personal feelings could not warp his judgment, he 
learned the scientific temper. Something of his discipline is incum- 
bent upon every student of the Bible. Let us imagine, for instance, 
that instead of the Jewish scriptures we are talking of those of the 
Greeks. Suppose that the heritage of Hellas had been preserved 
to us in the form of a Bible. What would be the character of the 
book? We should begin, perhaps, with a few passages from Hesiod 
on the birth of the gods and the dawn of civilization mingled with 
fragments of the Iliad and both set into long excerpts from He- 
rodotus. The dialogues of Plato might be given by Homeric heroes 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS HISTORY 83 

and the text of the great dramatists (instead of the prophets) be 
preserved interspersed one with another and clogged with the un- 
inspired and uninspiring comments of Alexandrian savants. Then 
imagine that the sense of their authority was so much obscured as 
centuries passed, that philosophers — for philosophers were to 
Greece what theologians were to Israel — came to believe that the 
large part of this composite work of history and philosophy had 
been first written down by Solon as the deliverance of the oracle 
of Apollo at Delphi. Then, finally, imagine that the text became 
stereotyped and sacred, even the words taboo, and became the 
heritage of alien peoples who knew nothing more of Greek history 
than what this compilation contained. Such, with some little ex- 
aggeration, would be a Hellenic Bible after the fashion of the Bible 
of the Jews. If the comparison be a little overdrawn there is no 
danger but that we shall make sufficient mental reservations to 
prevent us from carrying it too far. Upon the whole, so far as 
form and structure go, the analogy holds remarkably well. 

The Jews divided their scriptures into three main parts : The 
Law or Torah, the Prophets, and a miscellany loosely termed "The 
Writings." The Law is better known to Christians by the name 
given it by the Jews of Alexandria when they translated it into 
Greek, the Pentateuch ^ — or five books — or by the more definite 
title of "The Five Books of Moses," an attribution which rests on 
a late Jewish tradition .^ It is with these books that we have mainly 
to deal, for they furnish most of the fundamental historical problems 
of the Old Testament; but the finest narrative lies rather in the 
second group, which included as well as the books of prophecies, 
the four histories, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.^ The third 

^ They are also responsible for the names of the separate books, Genesis, Exodus, 
Deuteronomy, Leviticus. Numbers (Numeri) comes from the Latin. It is customary 
now to group with these five books Joshua, which is closely connected both in form 
and matter. This makes a Hexateuch instead of a Pentateuch. 

* This attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses is probably found in LI Chronicles 
23", 25*, 3S"; Ezra 3^, 6^^; Nehemiah 13^; Daniel 9".". it is found in Philo (fl. at 
the time of Christ), and in Josephus (first century a.d.) It also occurs in the 
New Testament. 

^ The "Prophets" included the three major prophets, Israel, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, 
and "the Twelve" {i.e. minor prophets), whose prophecies formed one book. 



84 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

division, the "Writings" or "Scriptures," of which the Psalms, Job 
and Proverbs are typical, contained as well some of the later his- 
tories — the Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah.^ 
To the first of these groups we now turn. 

*The full list of "the Scriptures" is: Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Exclesiastes, 
Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The higher criticism of the Old Testament and its analysis into its con- 
stituent parts goes back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and to the 
work of Dr. J. Astruc, Conjectures sur les mimoires originaux doni il parHt que 
Moyse se sendt pour composer le livre de la Genese, published in 1753. Slowly 
but steadily during the century following, scholarship gained upon prejudice, 
but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the doors were 
really thrown wide open to critiicism by the great work of J. Wellhausen. His 
Prolegomena to the History 0} Israel (English translation, 1885) and his article 
Israd and those by W. Robertson Smith in the ninth edition of the Ency- 
clopcedia Britannica marked the end of an era. The modern literatvure is so 
vast that only a few references can be given here. Most of the important 
foreign works have been translated, and the articles in the leading encyclo- 
paedias may be turned to for introductory outlines and bibliographies of specific 
sections. Popular introductions to the subject are to be fovind in G. F. Moore, 
The Literature of the Old Testament (Home University Library, 191 3); G. B. 
Gray, A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament (191 3); H. T. Fowler, A 
History of the Literature of Ancient Israel from the Earliest Times to 13s B.C. 
(191 2). Other works are S. R. Driver, A n Introduction to the Literature of the Old 
Testament (9th ed., 1913); C. H. Cornill, Introdttction to the Canonical Books 
of the Old Testament (tr. 1907) ; E. Kautzsch, An Outline of the History of the 
Literature of the Old Testament (tr. 1899). For an edition of the books of the 
Old Testament based on the results of modem scholarship, see C. F. Kent, 
Student's Old Testament (5 vols., 1904-1914), esp. Vol. I, "Begiimings of 
Hebrew History," and Vol. II, "Israel's Historical and Biographical Narra- 
tives." See also the large coimnentaries on the various books of the Old 
Testament, especially those in the series of the International Critical Com- 
mentary and The Expositor's Bible. For the relation of Hebrew history to 
general Semitic history, see A. Jeremias, The Old Testament in the Light of 
the Ancient East (2 vols., tr. 1911) (a book to be used with caution); G. A. 
Barton, A Sketch of Semitic Origins, Social and Religious (1902) ; and the 
works of R. W. Rogers and Morris Jastrow noted above. For the general 
history of Israel, see the monumental works of H. Ewald, The History of 
Israel (8 vols., tr. 1869-1886) which, though old, is still useful in many parts, 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS HISTORY 85 

and H. Graetz, History of the Jews (5 vols., tr. 1891-1898) esp. Vol. I. Other 
histories of the Hebrews are : R. L. Ottley, A Short History of the Hebrews 
to the Roman Period (1901) ; C. F. Kent, History of the Hebrew People (2 vols., 
1896-1897) ; Heroes and Crises of Early Hebrew History (1908) ; Founders and 
Riders of United Israel (1908) ; C. H. Cornill, History of the People of Israel (tr 
1898, 4th ed., 1909) ; H. P. Smith, Old Testament History (1903) ; R. Kittel 
History of the Hebrews (2 vols., tr. 189 5-1896) ; H. Guthe, Geschichte des Volkes 
Israel (3d ed., 1914) ; W. F. Bade, The Old Testament in the Light of Today 
(191 5). See, in general, W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish 
Church (2d ed., 1902). There is a short history of the higher criticism by 
A. Duff, A History of Old Testament Criticism (1910), which is useful for a 
sketch of Jewish antecedents. Those wishing to read the Bible for study 
purposes should use the American Revision, Standard Edition (1901). 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE PENTATEUCH 

The Pentateuch — or, to include Joshua, which really belongs 
with it, the Hexateuch, is composed of four main sources, dating 
from about the ninth century to about the fourth. Only two of 
these, the two oldest, are properly historical, but the other two, 
while chiefly taken up with laws and ritual, have so recast the text 
of the earlier ones that all four must be considered in a survey of 
Hebrew historiography. 

The earliest text, which runs through Genesis to Kings, is a 
repository of prehistoric legend. There had been legends of the 
patriarchs of the Israelites, passed down by tradition from the 
dimmest antiquity. They were just like those of any other primi- 
tive people, tribal legends of reputed ancestors and heroes, inter- 
mingled with myths of tribal religion. Anthropology can match 
them with similar stories from all over the world. They were kept 
alive, apparently, or at least some of them were, by recital at local 
shrines and holy places, of which the land was full. Every village 
had its altar for sacrifices to its divinities, and often a feast-hall 
for the festivities which followed. There were sacred groves and 
hill-top sanctuaries, haunted rocks and piles of stones ; and around 
each clung some legend of the olden time, some story of a hero who 
had once been there. If one reads the narratives of the patriarchs, 
even in the form in which we have them in Genesis now, one is 
struck with the continual punctuation of the stories by the erection 
of altars and the dedication of holy places. Wherever an oath is 
sworn, a sacrifice offered, or a vision is seen, the stones are piled 
up for an altar, which in most cases "remains even unto this day." ^ 
Often across successive editings one catches the touch of genuine 
local color in these incidents, and it does not take much analysis 

1 For such instances, cf. Genesis 12 ''• », 13 *• ", 16 ^-", 21 ^^-^' =«, 22 ", 23 ^' "• ", 
24 ", 25 ». ", 26 «. 32, 28 "-», 31 "• *•-*», 32 *", 33 *°, 35 "• "• ". 48 », 49 ", SO » 

86 



THE PENTATEUCH 87 

to discover in them the remnants of myths or legends of origin, like 
those which in the Middle Ages attributed so many foundations 
of churches and monasteries to the apostles.^ 

Such stories — at least among primitive peoples — are not to 
be attributed to conscious invention. They grow up of themselves. 
One might almost say that they are beUeved before they are told. 
The process of their fabrication is a purely social matter and is as 
much alive today as it was before Moses. How many colonial 
houses have had a visit from George Washington, or have become 
in some way associated with him? One person supposes heroic 
incidents may have happened here, another thinks they must and 
a third thinks they did. If there are skeptics, they are soon frowned 
down, because the world wishes the story. So Abraham built an 
altar in Shechem,^ Isaac dug the well of Shebah,^ Jacob piled boun- 
dary stones at Gal'ed — or Gilead,^ while, above all, two sacred 
mountains, Horeb and Sinai,^ were rivals for the vaster prestige 
of being the scene of the lawgiving of Moses. 

These legends not only dignified the locahty by a connection 
with the patriarchs and their divinities, but they also enriched the 
patriarchal tradition itself with a wealth of local detail. The 
material was therefore at hand for a great national saga, which 
should weave the incidents together in harmony with the major 
theme of the origins of the nation itself, looking back from settled 
agricultural Ufe to that of nomadic herdsmen from the fringe of 
the desert and beyond. Such national legends must be large enough 
in scope to include all the tribes who hold themselves akin, and bold 

* C. F. Kent, Student's Old Testament, Vol. I, pp. 8-12, classifies the legends under 
the headings : i. Biographical; clan and family legends, with the family as the central 
theme, held in the memory of wandering tribes for four or five centuries. 2. Institu- 
tional, e.g. explanatory of the origin of Sabbath or Passover. 3. Of Sacred Places, 
giving the origin of their names. 4. Of Origin of Proper Names, e.g. Abraham from 
ab-hamon, the father of a multitude. 5. Entertaining Stories, e.g. the journey of 
Abraham's servant for Rebekah. These latter were great favorites. The most stimu- 
lating work of recent times on these subjects, bringing great wealth of anthropological 
lore to illustrate the setting of Jewish legend and cult, is Sir J. G. Frazer's Folk Lore 
in the Old Testament (3 vols., 1918). 

* Genesis 12 *• '. 

» Genesis 26 ^, "Wherefore the name of the city is Beer-Sheba unto this day." 

* Popularly believed to be the etymology. 

* The mountain is Sinai in the accounts of P and probably J ; Horeb in E and D. 
Vide infra. 



88 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

enough to face the further question with which every mythology 
deals in some form or other, the origin not only of the tribesmen but 
of the world itself. Beyond the Nibelungen of this Semitic migra- 
tion, therefore, there reached out memories of pre-migration legends 
— the story of a flood in the old home-land east of the desert, the 
land of Shinar, or Sumeria, and of a garden of Eden where the 
first man learned the secrets of the gods. The patriarchal legends 
were thus prefaced with Babylonian creation and flood myths. 

These primitive materials were worked over into more or less 
consistent stories by various hands, and finally, about the year 
900 B.C., they were pulled together by a genuine master of narrative 
whose text still furnishes most of the naive and picturesque parts 
of the Old Testament from Genesis to Kings. ^ Since the distinctive 
note and unifying thread of the story, following undoubtedly the 
trend of the earlier models, is not so much the fortunes of the tribes- 
men as the way in which those fortunes depended upon the favor of 
the tribal god whose name is Jahveh,^ the unknown author, or 
rather reviser, is known to scholars by the simple epithet, "the 
Jahvist," or, since there were several Jahvists, as "the great 
Jahvist." ^ The latter epithet would be justified, even had there 
been no need of contrast, for the Hebrew Herodotus tells his ancient 
folk-tale with epic force and presents the materials, however crude, 
as they came to him. Although his own conception of God rises 
to heights of genuine sublimity, such as those passages where the 
splendor of Jahveh passes before the bowed figure of Moses, in 
the cleft of the mountains, — a spectacle which calls forth a lyric 
outburst worthy of the Psalms,* — yet he begins by repeating the 
naive account of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and God 
walking there in the cool of the day, of the curse on snakes and men, 
of giants and demi-gods, and of the flood. He does not balk at any 
semi-savage tale such as that of Hagar turned off into the wilder- 
ness to die, the l3dng cunning of Jacob toward his father and brother, 

1 Except Ruth, which is a product of the Persian or Greek period. 

* The emphasis, as will appear later, is up>on the name. 

' Or just "J" for short. The narrative by him is generally so indicated, merely 
by the letter. 

* C/. Exodus 33 «-« and 34 •"«• 



THE PENTATEUCH 89 

etc. Obviously these tales came down to him sanctioned by too 
universal acceptance to be discarded, although belonging to a lower 
grade of culture and morals than those of his own day. Like 
Herodotus, five centuries later, he left the ancient stories embedded 
in his own narrative; but unlike Herodotus, he offered no sug- 
gestion that the fables he retold were unworthy of credence. 

Within about a century after the work of the great Jahvist, a 
new compilation of the stories of the patriarchs appeared. The 
source of the Jahvist had been Judaea in southern Palestine ; this 
was from the northern kingdom of Israel. It was to a large degree 
parallel with the Jahvist, but with variations and different local 
touches. Its main distinction, however, is that throughout the 
narrative of the patriarchs it does not use the name Jahveh at all, 
but refers all the supernatural element in it to Elohim, a word 
difl&cult to translate, since, like so much of the language of religion, 
under the guise of primitive vocabulary it carries the conception 
of Divinity on to higher planes. Elohim, the plural of Eloah, 
means supernatural powers or Power.^ Mythologically it is con- 
nected with such spirits as one may find at hill-top altars and 
see if one sleeps in lonely places, local or household gods of a people 
just emerging from fetishism. This second of the prime narratives 
of the Old Testament is therefore known to biblical criticism as 
the Elohist account.^ According to it, *' the god of Abraham, Isaac 
and Jacob" was really unknown to them, since they did not know 
his name, and not to know the name of a god in primitive mythology 
is not to know the god himself.^ In other words, the nomadic 
period, with its barbarous morals and low-grade theology, is repre- 
sented as a pre-Jahvistic age. The god that eats his supper by 
the tent door and cannot even throw Jacob in a wrestling match 
except by a foul, is not Jahveh as J Ughtly assumes, for Jahveh 

' Cf. the Latin numina, some of which develop later into dei. 

' More often simply as "E." It is also well to recall that "J," Jahvist, is now 
used often by scholars to signify Judaistic, and "E," Ephraimistic, from their source. 

' The sacred character of the name is insisted upon wherever religion is invested 
with the power of the curse or blessing. Anthropology supplies evidence of the uni- 
versality of this belief. The formulas of blessing or benediction by the sacred name 
have lost most of their primitive meaning, but the oath still retains the power of the 
curse. 



9© INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

is a more exalted deity. The ancestors of Israel, according to this 
narrative, were worshipping local deities or their own protecting 
genii in about the same way as the rest of the primitive world. It 
is therefore in the interest of a higher conception of Jahveh that the 
story omits his name from the crude beginnings of the age of mi- 
gration. According to the Elohist, Jahveh first definitely appears 
in the national history after the period of nomadic Ufe, at the second 
great era in Hebrew history, that of the conquest and settlement. 
It is at that dramatic point where Moses hears the oracle from the 
burning bush, commissioning him to lead the Israehtes out of 
Egypt.^ In response to the insistence of Moses, the god Elohim 
at last reveals his name, in cryptic, oracular fashion : *'I am going 
to be what I am going to be." Thus Jahveh enters definitely into 
the story of the Elohist, which from this on runs along much Like 
that of the Jahvist. It differs, however, in two or three important 
particulars. In the first place it presents a higher conception of 
the deity, who does not show himself bodily to men, but reveals 
himself only in visions or by a voice from the unseen. He dwells 
in the heavens, which only a ladder of dreams can reach, and — a 
fact of prime importance — uses as the medium of communication 
a special class of men, devoted to his service, gifted with second sight 
and the power of miracle. This latter element, that of the miracu- 
lous, thus enters into the story to a marked degree, more so than 
in the naive account of J. For instance, the waters of the Red 
Sea are driven back by a high wind according to J ; they are made 
to divide miraculously at the touch of Moses' wand, according to 
E. This enhancement of miracle, introduced to exalt the dignity 
and the claims of Jahveh, served its purpose throughout all suc- 
ceeding centuries. So long as miracle was regarded as the especial 
mark of divinity the more miracle the Bible could boast the more 
authentic it seemed. Now, however, in an age of science, when 
miracles are disowned on general principles, the romantic ad- 
ditions to the primitive tale contributed by the narrative of E 
merely lower its value as history. One is confronted with a situa- 
tion similar to that of mediaeval saint-legends, where the miracles 
multiply the farther one goes from the original source, and multiply 
almost according to formula. 

> Exodus 3. 



THE PENTATEUCH 91 

If the account of J is more reliable than E in its treatment of 
incident, — that is, more nearly a reflection of primitive myth, — 
the same is true of the treatment of morals. E toned down the 
cruel and crude stories of the olden time, which J had allowed to 
stand as tradition had preserved them. A higher moral standard 
in the present was demanding a more edifying past. Under such 
circumstances E, which apparently began as an independent and 
parallel compilation, drawn from similar — or the same — sources 
as J, became the basis for a revision of the whole mass of legend. 
For just as there were several Jahvists there were several Elohists, 
and the text came to reflect definitely the great reform of the 
prophets Amos and Hosea, in which the national religion was al- 
most as completely recast as when Christianity broke away from 
it some seven or eight centuries later. The tribal deity — chiefly 
a war god — who had replaced the local divinities through the 
ardent propaganda of the Jahvist prophets, now was conceived of 
in terms of pure moral conduct. His true worship was not sacrifice 
but upright living. Nothing could be more foreign than this to 
the ideas of the olden time ; then Jahveh had been the fierce unfor- 
giving god of taboo and ceremonial ; now he was transformed into 
a god of love and righteousness. This reconstruction of religion in- 
volved a reconstruction of history, a reconstruction so sweeping as 
to be termed by some modern scholars the first attempt at higher 
criticism. The old tribal story was recast to make the role of 
Jahveh more consistent with the newer ethics,^ and, incidentally, 
more credible. The men who wrote the decalogue — for the 
Elohists were responsible for the ten commandments — did not 
hesitate at what would now be accounted changing the records 
in order to permit them to insert it as divine command. 

Sometime in the seventh century a Judaean author joined J 
and E into a single narrative, known as JE, — a rather careless 
weaving of the two strands, not eliminating contradictions and 
repetitions. Evidently this bunghng performance was forced upon 
the editor by the vitality of the various versions, but he rather in- 
creased than lessened his difficulties by adding further variants 
from still other sources. Unsatisfactory as his compilation is from 
the standpoint of a finished artistic production, the bibhcal critic 

* For instance, the condemnation of the worship of Jahveh in the form of a bull. 



92 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

is often grateful that it is as poor as it is ; for the trace of the differ- 
ent strands, which we have just been examining, might otherwise 
have been obliterated. Had Judaea produced a Thucydides for 
the perpetuation of its national history, capable of rising to the 
full height of his theme and recasting the fragmentary and uncouth 
materials into the mould of art, the history of the world would now 
be poorer instead of richer, for the sources would have been lost. 

But the process of Pentateuch authorship was not complete 
with the final edition of JE. In the second half of the seventh 
century a new element was introduced, preserved mainly in the 
book of Deuteronomy, and so known to bibHcal scholars simply as 
the Deuteronomist, — or D for short. Although not narrative in 
the sense of J or E, this body of religious precept was responsible 
for a yet bolder attempt than E to upset much of the accepted 
text, in order to swing the whole in line with its exalted outlook. 
That the outlook was really exalted — the finest in the Old Testa- 
ment — any one will admit who reads the fifth to the eleventh 
chapters of Deuteronomy and then compares them with the rest 
of the world's literature before the climax of antique civilization.* 
In order, however, to realize this high ethical religion it was neces- 
sary to discredit the crude heathenism which still persisted at those 
local shrines, at which J had gathered so much of its narrative, — 
the very shrines which were set up by the patriarchs themselves. 
D insisted that Jahveh could be sacrificed to in one place only — the 
temple at Jerusalem.^ Local altars tend to a localization of the deity, 
— as they do still, — so they must go, and the priests who attended 
them must become priests of Jahveh in his one and only temple.^ 

^ E had denied that the cult at high places of the early period had been a real cult 
of Jahveh. The Deuteronomic reformers now went much farther. They denied that 
this hill-top and village worship could ever be legitimate in the religion of Jahveh. 

2 "The core of D is CC. 5-1 1; 12-26; 28," G. F, Moore, The Literature oj the 
Old Testament, pp. 58-59. 

' Deuteronomy 18 *> '. It proved impossible on account of the vested rights of 
the Jerusalem priesthood. A degradation of these priests to levites resulted and was 
justified by Ezekiel. 

This helps to date D with certainty. Hosea does not show any belief in the 
special sacredness of the temple. This doctrine does not come before the latter 
part of the seventh century. But Hosea's influence upon D's conception of God is 
obvious. Language and style also point to the seventh century. 



THE PENTATEUCH 93 

The reformers had to find the justification for such a sweeping 
innovation, which tore up the customs of village life by the roots, 
in oracles of Jahveh from the olden time, and since these were 
lacking, they were obliged to invent them to meet the emergency. 
Most of the invention naturally was attributed to the greatest 
figure of the Hebrew legends — Moses. The ancient texts (es- 
pecially E) had already made him the mouthpiece of Jahveh at a 
sacred mountain; D elaborated his deHverances with new divine 
instructions. This is the main change made by D. It is more 
law than history, but the history had to accommodate itself to the 
law; and D is responsible for the transformation of the figure of 
Moses from that of a prophet and seer to that of the greatest law- 
giver of antiquity, a transformation which was completed by the 
next and last of the four main contributions to the Pentateuch.^ 

The last contribution to the Pentateuch was written either 
during the exile at Babylon or during the Persian period which 
followed.^ It is known as the Priestly History, or P for short,^ for 
it reviews the whole history of J and E from the standpoint of the 
priesthood of the temple. This is, perhaps, the most important of all 
the contributions so far as the present text of the Bible is concerned, 
for it furnishes the general framework of history, as we have it now. 

That framework is very remarkable. We are far removed 

* The book of Deuteronomy came to light m the eighteenth year of the reign of 
Josiah. The story is told in II Kings 22. While repairing the temple, under orders 
of Josiah, Hilkiah, the high priest, found it. "And Hilkiah the high priest said unto 
Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. And 
Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it. . . . And Shaphan the scribe read 
it before the king, and it came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the 
law, that he rent his clothes. And the king commanded . . . saying : Go ye, inquire 
of the Lord for one and for the people . . . concerning the words of this book that is 
found." So they consulted a "prophetess" who instructed them to follow it. Then 
(Chap. 23) the reform was inaugurated, the local altars broken, the groves cut 
down, and all the sacred places polluted with dead men's bones or otherwise profaned. 
Not the least significant incident from the standpoint of historiography is the con- 
sultation of the "prophetess" to learn of the validity of the law, 

^ It is generally thought to be the book of The Law (Torah) which Ezra brought 
back with him to Judaea when sent to Jerusalem by the Persian Artaxerxes in 458 B.C. 
But the text does not bear the mark of the theological interests of the period of Nehe- 
mlah, — the especial prohibitions of mixed marriages. 

' A better title is " The Book of Origins " (H. Ewald, The History of Israel, 8 vols., 
trans. 1869-1886, Vol. I, pp. 74 sqq.). 



94 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

in it from the naive, gossipy narratives of the olden time. Five 
hundred years, or so, had elapsed since the Jahvist wove together 
his material — already hoary with age when he found it. In those 
five centuries we may almost be said to pass from a Froissart or 
Gregory of Tours, credulous, simple-minded but a bom raconteur, 
to a Hegel, with a philosophy of history. P arranges the phenomena 
of the past according to a theory, a theory very similar, indeed, 
in general outlines to that of Hegel. He finds the meaning of his- 
tory in successive self -revelations by Jahveh. With this principle 
as a guide, the author groups the main incidents of history around 
four great figures and into four great epochs, — those of Adam, 
Noah, Abraham and Moses. Around these figures all the different 
lines are made to converge, the first three as ancestral heroes, the 
last as the especial mouthpiece of Jahveh. Lines of genealogy — 
P is responsible for this dismal element in the text — serve both 
to fink the chief personages and to indicate the passage of time.* 
One must not credit P with the imagination necessary for the in- 
vention of so impressive a scheme, for the data already suggested 
it. Legends tend to concentrate upon a few heroic figures and to 
culminate in dramatic epochs. But what had been a natural de- 
velopment of the story became, under the hand of P, artificial, 
doctrinal and unreal.^ All history led up to the estabhshment of 
the temple, all the fortunes of Israel depended upon the observance 
of the taboos, codified under Moses. The prescriptions for the 
temple-worship are asserted to have been given already at Sinai, 
anticipating the temple itself by many centuries.^ The preroga- 

^ The difficulties in this problem were easily met by giving fabulous ages to the 
generations of which few names were known. On the genealogies see note on Nehe- 
miah below, p. 103. P carries the genealogies from the Creation to Abraham as 
follows : the generations of Adam, Genesis 5 ; of Noah, 6 ' ; of the sons of Noah, 10 ; 
of Shem, 11 '"; of Terah, 11 ". 

2 A comparison of the first chapter of Genesis (by P) with the second (by J) will 
show how far removed is the last contribution from the first, not only in matter but 
also in style. In the one, creation comes from the fiat of a god who remains aloof 
from his universe ; in the other he breathes into the dust to make man live and then 
associates with him as a companion. The style of P is here suitable to his theme, 
for the lack of detail which makes the rest of his story bald and dry was here most 
appropriate. Later on his inferiority is more apparent. 

3 All sacrifice except by the priesthood is illegitimate, hence P does not admit that 
the patriarchs ever sacrificed. 



THE PENTATEUCH 95 

tives of the priests, — with their levite temple servants and national 
tithes for their support, — are safeguarded by miracle and exalted 
to dominate the nation to an impossible extent. In short, P is less 
a historian than an apologist and theologian. Yet it was his 
account which gave the tone to the completed scriptures, for, some- 
time in the fifth or fourth centuries B.C., a final edition fitted the 
composite JED into the narrative of P and so gave us the text of 
the first five books of the Bible.^ 

We must close this section of our survey by a glance back at 
its opening, — the story of Creation. The first chapter of Genesis 
comes from P, — an account written almost in the days of Herodo- 
tus. In any case it was not until his time that the second chapter 
(from J) was added to the first. Herodotus, too, was interested 
in the origin of things, so much so that he made a special journey 
to the Phoenicians to verify an Egyptian account of the beginnings 
of human society, where "Hercules" played somewhat the role 
of Jahveh. If ever the historian is justified in speculating on what 
might have been, he may surely be allowed the privilege of con- 
ducting the Father of History the few miles inland to Jerusalem, 
to discuss the matter with the author of Genesis ! It is doubt- 
ful if the intellectual heritage of succeeding ages would have been 
much changed by such a meeting ; for Herodotus could not have 
guessed that the mixture of myth and tribal legend which the 
Jewish historian was editing would have been taken at rather 
more than its face value by the whole of western civilization for 
almost two millenniums, as the explanation — the genesis — of 
the entire world ; and the Jew could have understood just as little 
the rational temper of his Greek confrere, or the importance of his 
inquiry. But in the days when religion and history began once 
more to be studied by the comparative method, such as Herodotus 
tried to use, and the priests of Eg)TDt and Babylon to be interro- 
gated, this time in their own tongue, nothing could match in interest, 
for the critic of the Bible, such an imaginary conversation recorded 
by the hand of Herodotus. 

* This is a simplification of the actual process, for the separate J and E continued 
to circulate after JE was made, and there are other elements in the composition not 
covered here. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE REMAINING fflSTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 

The main sources of the Pentateuch run on into the books 
which follow. The old collections of traditions, J and E or similar 
narratives, tangle themselves together; Deuteronomist historians 
use them to preach their lesson that disaster is always due to sin 
and especially to the anger of Jahveh, then priestly hands insert, 
at likely points in the narrative, sections — largely imaginative 
— which exalt the role of the priesthood. Then comes the work of 
the author-editors, who throw the miscellany into approximately 
the present form, a work which was not completed untU later. 
Since we have already seen this composite process of authorship 
worked out in some detail in connection with the Pentateuch, we 
shall pass in more hurried review over these remaining books. 

Joshua is so intimately connected with the five preceding books 
that it is now customary to treat it along with them, the six forming 
the Hexateuch. It carries over into the conquest the same elements 
as we have seen in the Pentateuch, or continuations of them. The 
book falls rather clearly into two main parts : the first twelve 
chapters dealing with the conquest, the next ten with the division 
of the land, while an appendix of two final chapters gives a vale- 
dictory warning of Joshua after the fashion of that of Moses. ^ Of 
these, the second section, that describing the allotment of the 
tribes, is obviously an invention emanating from the same kind of 
priestly imagination of a late day as the P (Book of Origins) of the 
Pentateuch, but the imagination in this case became somewhat 
too business-like, when it asserted that forty-eight cities, some of 
them the best in the country, belonged by right of original assign- 
ment to priests and levites. We need not delay long over that 
kind of " history." ^ The story of the conquest is told by a Deuter- 

^ In Deuteronomy 33 *~^ Of course there are interpolations within these sections. 
* Although some of it rests on older material, especially E. 

96 



HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 97 

onomic moralizer,^ who used the two older sources, continuations 
of J and E, to suit his taste. Now these earlier narratives did 
not agree as to how the Hebrews conquered Canaan, for the one 
(J) made it a movement of scattered war-bands, who settled in 
the open country, being unable to take the walled towns, while 
the other (E) had a great tale of how they destroyed the Canaanites 
root and branch, in a vast migration, somewhat the way the Saxon 
invaders were credited in the old histories of England with the 
destruction of the Britons. The taste of the Deuteronomic editor 
— whose edition was taken over by the author of Joshua — was for 
this latter source, with its story of miracles and slaughter. This 
accounts for such tales as the crossing of the Jordan in which all 
the wonders are repeated with which legend had surrounded the 
reputed crossing of the Red Sea, — waters piled up and a march 
through in priestly procession.^ It also accounts for the story of 
the falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of trumpets, although 
traces of the fact that the city was taken by storm in the ordinary 
way are still to be detected in the narrative. The book of Joshua 
frankly cut out the plain facts of history in favor of heroic legend. 
Strangely enough, however, the substance of the unheroic narrative 
(J) was preserved in another place. The opening chapter of Judges 
and the first five verses of the second chapter sum up the story 
of the conquest as it probably happened .^ There the truth crops 
out that the advance of the Israelites was a slow, intermittent move- 
ment, and that it left the fortified cities practically untouched, 
making inevitable that racial blend and intercourse against which 
the prophets of Jahveh were to protest so vehemently. One can 
see, in the light of their national fanaticism, how natural it would 
be for writers, saturated in the doctrines of these prophets, to 
believe in the exaggerated rather than the true account of the war 
upon the native population. That is the explanation for the rela- 
tively poor history of the book of Joshua. 

^ One, that is, thoroughly associated with the spirit and style of the writers of 
Deuteronomy. 

*The infertility of the myth-making faculty becomes apparent here. Folk- 
lorists are familiar with this limitation of the imagination to a few staple ex- 
ploits, which repeat themselves indefinitely. The legends of the saints are mostly 
alike. 

' Subsequent events of Hebrew history agree with it. 



98 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

The book of Judges begins, as we have seen, with the fragments 
which might have been used as a basis for the opening of Joshua. 
The proper narrative of the ''judges" begins at the close of this 
short review of the conquest and the death of Joshua.^ The key- 
note to the book is struck at once.^ The Israelites are continually 
forgetting Jahveh or violating his taboos ; his anger is aroused 
and he turns them over to spoilers;^ then ''judges" — war- 
chieftains and petty rulers — rise to throw off the yoke ; again 
the people sin, and again are given up to tyrants ; again a "judge" 
arises to smite the oppressor and to rule for a generation; again 
comes anarchy, and again a deliverer, etc., etc. It is an eternal 
round. Such history is suspect on the face of it. It is even more 
so when one looks at the chronology, for the periods of disaster and 
deliverance run regularly for twenty, forty or eighty years, or 
approximately so. When we recall that this chronology runs 
through Samuel and Kings, that the reigns of David and Solomon 
are each given as forty years, which was reckoned as the average 
length of a generation in the Old Testament, we see here a schematic 
arrangement of history quite too regular and symmetrical to be 
true. Each moral lesson is framed in a generation. We do not 
have to look far to see the principles upon which the whole is con- 
structed. The Deuteronomist interpreted tribal wars and the 
anarchy of Bedouin-like people as part of the providential scheme 
of Jahveh, and it is a significant fact that whenever a theologian 
— of any religion — has attempted to use history to justify the 
ways of God to man, he has the history rearranged so that its 
artificial character may convince the reader that it was actually 
planned!^ As for the exact time allowed each judgeship, the 
chronology apparently was fixed so as to try to fill in the four hun- 
dred and eighty years which, according to I Kings 6 \ lay between 
the exodus and the building of the temple, although the attempt 
is not quite successful. 

But if the main part of the book of Judges ^ was cast into this 
form by a Deuteronomist writer in the sixth century, the material 

* Judges 2 '. Verses 6, 8, 9 are literal repetitions from the last chapter of Joshua. 
» Judges 2 "■^. 3 Judges 2 "• ". 

* We come upon this especially in the work of the Christian historians. 

* To the end of the sixteenth chapter. 



HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 99 

which he used is genuine, old, legendary stufif, tales of heroes and 
semi-savage men, often unvarnished, with all their vindictive 
cruelty and cunning, their boastful exaggeration, both of prowess 
and slaughter. The very savagery of these stories is in their 
favor; they bear the mark of their time, and reflect, through 
all their bombast, the wild age when, as the narrative plain- 
tively repeats, "there was no king in Israel." It was surely a 
triumph for the compiler of this material to reduce it, even 
partially, to be food for sermons. Fortunately he was still 
enough of a savage himself not to rub out all the savagery of his 
ancestors. 

When we come to the narrative of the founding of the kingdom/ 
our sources work out in a remarkable way. The originals become 
both more reliable and fuller. Contemporary accounts from those 
who knew intimately the ins and outs of camp and court have been 
preserved almost untouched by subsequent editing. There is 
no such artistic manipulation of events as we have just seen in 
Judges, by seventh or sixth century reformers. They left almost 
untouched the great story of David, because they could not have 
improved upon it in any case. Through a period of national 
expansion and successful war, the worship of the national god, 
Jahveh, was not likely to meet with serious rivalry from the local 
deities of earth and the fertility gods — the Baals — which in time 
of peace were continually drawing the attention of the farmers.^ 
The buUding of the temple at Jerusalem was the logical conclusion 
of the war period begun by Saul's battles with the Philistines; 
the war god was enthroned on the citadel. Consequently the 
later prophets and priests of Jahveh had relatively little to change 
in the sources which carried the narrative of J up to its fitting and 
triumphant conclusion, and we have fairly contemporary and 
unspoiled narratives. 

Here, therefore, at last we come upon the best product of 

* The stories of Eli and Samuel really belong with those of the Judges. Even in 
the fonn in which we have it now, this connection is emphasized by the address, which 
Samuel delivers in I Samuel 12, and which forms a fitting literary close to the Judges, 
similar to the addresses of Moses and Joshua. This at least seems to fit one stratum 
of sources. 

* C/. G. F. Moore, op. cit., p. 94. 



100 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Hebrew historiography. The story-telling art of J is ^ no longer 
working over the naive old tales of Genesis, but deals with well- 
known men and recent events, and in the tale of the houses of Saul 
and David we have something which will rank with the best the 
world can offer. Few figures from antiquity stand out more clearly, 
in all their complex humanity, than that of David. We have him 
in all his weakness as well as his strength ; no shocked moralizer 
got rid of his sins at the expense of his character. Legend, which 
always surrounds great men, even when alive, added something, so 
that subsequent ages endow him with extravagant gifts of poetry as 
they did his son with equally extravagant gifts of wisdom, but his per- 
sonality and the story of his reign remain on the solid basis of history. 
This detailed, reliable history runs through the two books of Sam- 
uel into the first two chapters of the first book of Kings. But from 
the reign of Solomon a vastly different type of narrative takes its 
place. The events of four centuries are chronicled in the same amount 
of space as was devoted to the Ufetime of David alone, and even 
this meagre outline is blurred by the Deuteronomic editors. For 
the history of the period from Solomon to the Babylonian captivity 
is cast in the same mould as that which we have already seen in 
Judges. Disaster is due to neglect in the worship of Jahveh, and 
more especially to the persistence of the old worship in high places 
in spite of the claims of the temple at Jerusalem to be Jahveh's 
sole abode. The result of this line of interpretation of history, 
carried to the extreme, is that we have less a history of kings than 
a commentary upon Jahveh-worship, for the author pays little 
attention to the importance of the reigns he catalogues except as 
they can be made to illustrate the theological point he is making. 
For instance, Omri, who founded a great dynasty in the Northern 
Kingdom, is dismissed in one verse,^ although Assyrian inscriptions 
recognize his greatness to the extent of calling the Kingdom of Israel 
Beth-Omri.3 Since this founder of the city of Samaria, however, 

* The source of Samuel is so much in the spirit of the J of the Pentateuch and 
Joshua, that the same sjmibol is used for it ; but that does not necessarily imply the 
same authorship or even that the text in Samuel is a continuation of the J of the older 
part. But whatever their relationship, the conception and style are so similar as to 
justify the symbol for both. ^ I Kings i6 ^. 

» On the translation of this see R. W, Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testa- 
ment, p. 304, n. 2. 



HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT loi 

permitted the old worship of the golden calves, he was obviously 
not an edifying figure for a history which was intended to prove 
that such heathenish rites spelled disaster. In such cavalier fashion 
the book of "the Kings" treats the successive reigns of both Judah 
and Israel. Historians have seldom resisted the temptation to 
draw a moral from history, but here the history itself was drawn into 
a moral, until it distorted the whole perspective.^ The fact that 
even today only biblical scholars are able to recover the correct 
perspective is sufficient comment upon the poor quaUty of these 
last chapters of Hebrew national history, and the critics have re- 
ceived most of their hints from elsewhere — cuneiform inscriptions 
and a study of the prophets. 

From time to time, however, through this mangled chronicle, 
a remark is inserted which excites the interest of the historian. The 
reign of Solomon is cut short with the remark: *'And the rest of 
the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they 
not written in the book of the acts of Solomon?"^ Similarly at 
the close of the account of Jeroboam and Rehoboam: "And the rest 
of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, behold, 
they are written in the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of 
Israel."^ . . . "Now the rest of the acts of Rehoboam, and all 
that he did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the 
Kings of Judah?" ^ The formula occurs practically without fail 
at the end of the narrative of every reign.^ This means that, in the 
eyes of the author, his work was less a history than a commentary. 
It also shows us that from the days of Solomon, there were royal 
annals, like those of Assyria, which were kept in the capital, and 
that after the separation of the ten tribes under Jeroboam, each 
kingdom kept its record. The Bible does not preserve these for us ; 
it preserves only as much as suited the priestly and prophetic 
writers intent upon making history a handmaid to religion.^ 

' Cf. G. F. Moore, op. ciL, p. 103, "Some one has said that history is philosophy 
teaching by example; for the author of Kings history was prophecy teaching by 
example." The short survey of Kings in this admirable little book covers the ground 
so thoroughly and satisfactorily that it is hard to avoid repeating its treatment. 

2 1 Kings 11". 3 Ibid., 14 ". " Ibid., 14 2*. 

6 Cf. also I Kings 15 ». «, 16 ■>. ". ", II Kings 8 « 10 «, 12 ", 13 «• »2, 14 1«, ". ", 

IS '• ", 16 ", 20 20, 21 ". 25, 23 28, 24 5, etc. 

• Other sources were used as well as these annals. There are traces of tradition, 



102 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

This royal chronicle (referred to but not reproduced in the Bible) 
marks the end of the age of tradition and brings us, at last, into 
that of written records. The separate tribes had been welded into 
a nation, and while the different settlements undoubtedly preserved 
still their ancient stories, the breaking-up of their isolation made 
the traditions complex, hard to remember and more or less trivial 
and irrelevant. The great feats of Saul and David were bound 
to overshadow the less notable past. So when the Hebrew system 
of writing came in, as it did for the first time under the kingdom, 
history developed at the court of Solomon in apparently somewhat 
the same official way in which we find it in the courts of the late 
Babylonian kings. The legend was giving way to annals, romance 
yielding to business-like records, a change which has taken place 
in every country at the moment when it begins to acquire what it 
calls civilization. 

There remains only one other Hebrew history, — that which 
runs through the books of Chronicles,^ Ezra and Nehemiah. This 
is a single work, written by one hand, probably after 300 B.c.^ 
It is a summary of the whole history given in the preceding books, 
at least so far as immediately concerned the kingdom of Judah and 
Jerusalem. Its author uses the "Book of the Kings of Judah and 
Israel" and the "Book of the Kings of Israel" and other such 
sources which have since been lost. He was evidently a learned 
priest of the temple at Jerusalem, intent upon its preeminence and 
especially interested in its liturgy. His exaggerations of the 
glory of the Davidic Kingdom are especially noticeable, but for 
that matter the work is not important as history until we leave the 
book of Chronicles and come to Ezra. 

? The two books of Ezra and Nehemiah are really one,' and bear 
the title Ezra in the Jewish Bible. This contains the history of 
the Jews from the Persian release to the coming of Alexander, Its 
main interest for us, however, lies less in its value as source material 

and especially there are the heroic legends of the prophets Elijah and EUsha. Other 
literary sources may be detected. 

1 The name Chronicon was Jerome's rendering of the Hebrew title "Events of 
the Times." 

' Vide Dictionary of the Bible (edited by J. Hastings, i898-i904),Vol. I, pp. 289 sqq. 

• The division seems to have been due to Christians, later. 



HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 103 

to the modern historian than in the unique personal memoirs of 
Nehemiah and Ezra which have been embedded in the narrative. 
In spite of the fact that they were sadly mutilated in the process 
of fitting them in, these two documents remain unique in Hebrew 
and perhaps in antique historiography. The memoirs of Nehemiah 
are especially fine. The restorer of Jerusalem gives no petty copy 
of the vainglorious boasting of Assyrian kings when they recited 
their great deeds. Instead, he seems to have kept a remarkably 
sane appreciation of the proportion of things. His sense of the 
importance of what he is doing does not conceal the fact that he is 
dealing with petty tribal neighbors, who could end it all if he 
would stray over to one of their villages.^ Homely detail lifts the 
story into that realm of realism, which only really great writers 
can risk entering without loss of authority.^ The result is one of 
the most graphic pictures in the Bible, sketched in a few words. 
Take, for instance, the building of the wall : "They which builded 
on the wall and they that bare burdens, . . . every one with one 
of his hands wrought in the work and with the other held a weapon. 
. . . And he that sounded the trumpet was by me. ... So we 
labored in the work, and half of them held the spears from the 
rising of the morning till the stars appeared." ^ 

The memoirs of Ezra are of an inferior quaHty to this. Their 
significance in Hebrew historiography lies mainly in their content. 
For as Nehemiah tells how he built the Jews a city to be safe from 
their neighbors, Ezra tells how he kept them apart from these same 
neighbors by refusing to admit intermarriage,* and then, in the 

* One possible piece of exaggeration seems to be the statement that the walls were 
completed in fifty-two days. Josephus, relying on other sources, says it took two years 
and four months. Cf. Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XI, Chap. V, Sect. 8. But a prelimi- 
nary wall may have been built, or the text may have been corrupted. 

^ His interest in economic matters is especially noteworthy. Cf. Nehemiah 5 
and the laws codified in Leviticus 25 ^~^^. 

' Nehemiah 4 ^''~^^. More realistic still is the twenty-third verse : " So neither 
I nor my brethren nor my servants nor the men of the guard which followed me, none 
of us put ofif our clothes, except that every one put them off for washing." Was the 
last verse a later emendation? 

* This exclusive policy of Ezra, it has been pointed out, was likely to emphasize 
the question of descent and so to call forth an interest in genealogies. We see the 
effect of this in Nehemiah 7 (cf. verse 61), where a list of what one might term pure- 
blooded, patrician Jewish families is given. One recalls in this connection the fact 
that P, which is attributed to the time of Ezra, was responsible for the long genealogies 



I04 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

year 443 or 444, brought forth a book which, if tradition and the 
surmise of modern scholarship be correct, centred the whole world's 
history at their very temple.* Whatever the exact book was which 
he expounded, subsequent Jewish tradition beheved that it was 
nothing short of epoch-making, and the name of Ezra, or Esdras, 
became the greatest among the scribes.^ 

The books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah contain these 
rich historical materials; but their compiler should have little 
credit for his share in their preservation. His editorial task was 
done as clumsily and unintelhgently as his chronicle is biassed and 
dry. One fact, however, we can deduce from his narrative, which 
enables us to state the conclusion of the long process of cooperative 
authorship by which the Bible story was finally made. As the 
chronicler apparently used the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Samuel 
and Kings in that order, it seems likely that by about 300 B.C. they 
had already been put together in the form in which we have them 
now. 

This ends our survey of what are commonly known as the 
historical books of the Old Testament, although it by no means 
covers the field of interest to the historian. For in the othef 
works, especially in the prophetic writings, there are narratives of 
prime importance, if only secondarily historical. The memoirs 
of a governor hke Nehemiah are fully matched, for instance, by the 
biography of Jeremiah, preserved by his friend and secretary, 
Baruch.^ Taken in its setting, along with the words of the prophet, 
this is a human document of the first order. In personal self- 
revelation and high reUgious feeling it has not unaptly been com- 



of the earlier historical books. Evidently the reestablished Jews were working up 
their ancestry with great eagerness. It should be noted, however, that there is a 
reference in Ezekiel 13 ' to registers of "the house of Israel," at the beginning of the 
exile. Cf. Josephus, Against Apion, Bk. I, Chap. V sqq. 

^ The narrative of P, based upon the teachings of Ezekiel. Cf. supra, p. 94. Thus 
the Jews began again their national existence, self-centred and isolated, with relatively 
slight intercourse with the gentile world. 

' A considerable literature grew up in his name, and a late tradition went so far 
as to regard him as the restorer of the law, the author of some seventy works, and 
finally as the last of writers in the canon of the Old Testament. 

8 Cf. Jeremiah 32, 36 * sqq., 43 ^, 45, etc. 



HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT loS 

pared with the Confessions of Augustine. There are similar poetic 
or realistic glimpses of the life of the time and the policy of rulers 
throughout most of this prophetic hterature ; but however much 
it affected history its purpose was not historical and we must 
leave it aside. 

There is, finally, one supremely good piece of historical writing 
in that considerable body of Jewish literature which is not included 
in the Old Testament as known to Protestant readers. The first 
book of Maccabees is a stirring narrative of the most heroic days 
of the Jewish nation, a straightforward account, gathered from eye- 
witnesses^ and from written sources, of the great war of liberation 
begun by Judas Maccabaeus in which the newly vitalized hopes of 
the Jews were actually realized for a period, and political was 
added to reUgious liberty. The history of this achievement is 
given with scientific scruple, and in minuteness of detail and 
accuracy of information it ranks high among any of the histories 
of antiquity. One appreciates these qualities aU the more when 
one turns to the second book of Maccabees and sees how the same 
kind of detail is marred by inaccuracy and distorted by partisan- 
ship, until the book becomes a mere historical pamphlet for the 
Pharisees. The fundamental difference between the two books 
is that in the first, religious interests yield to the historical, while 
in the second they yield to nothing. It is the same contrast which 
we have met time and again, of a book that tells the truth as over 
against one that is meant to edify. But then the latest phase of 
pre-Christian Jewish thought passed farther and farther away 
from scientific interest in the facts of a past which offered no more 
triumphs to record, and turned from the humiliation of reality 
to that bright dreamland of hope, the kingdom of the Messiah. 
The two great eras of David and the Maccabees had produced 
histories worthy of the deeds they recorded ; but the last sad age of 
Jewish national life consoled itself with apocalyptic visions and 
prophecies of the future. In such a situation, the genuine, old 
histories themselves suffered as well. They were plundered for 
texts to buttress beUef, and history suffered that faith might live. 

* Although written in the second generation after the event. 



io6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

The significance of this conclusion of our survey of Hebrew 
historiography should not escape us, nor should it be misinter- 
preted. It is a saddening paradox that the higher we treasure 
ideals the more likely are we to violate others for them. The 
historian devotes himself to the discovery and preservation of the 
truth. By the truth he means an objective fact or an assemblage 
of such facts. He is apt to forget that this objectivity upon which 
he insists as the very basis of their reahty does not exist for those 
who actually use or have used the facts. Hence when he finds 
high-minded moralists plundering the data of the past to point 
their morals, he loses respect for both their history and their ethics, 
without having considered the possibihty that the non-historical 
attitude might conceivably have a justification. No one could 
pretend that the violation of historical standards of truth could be 
excused today on any basis of morals; for in our appreciation 
of the value of scientific work we recognize — in theory — nothing 
higher than truth. But in the pre-scientific world, where few of 
the data were established with absolute certainty, the case was 
different. The idea of objective historical truth could have only 
a limited appeal, since the medium for the preservation of fact 
was so imperfect. We have spoken elsewhere of the stimulus 
to accuracy in modern scholarship owing to the consciousness that 
others are on our trail. But the heightening of the value of facts 
brings with it a certain unhistorical failure to appreciate why they 
should have been so lightly esteemed by men who are apparently 
inspired by as high ideals — so far as morals go — as the modern 
critic. 

This is the problem which confronts the critic of Hebrew history. 
For those who wrote the Pentateuch and the books of histories, 
who edited out their diverse sources and gave them their final form, 
there was something in the world worth more than annals of the 
past. The forces of the future were in their hands, forces which 
determined the fate not only of Jewish history but of the religious 
outlook of the whole world. The prophets of the eighth century 
were those great innovators who made religion over from a set of 
taboos to a moral code, and substituted upright living for sacrifice. 
It is small wonder if the legends of the past were made over as well 
into a form to suit the new outlook. Their own work was of vastly 



fflSTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 107 

more importance to the men who wrote under the new inspiration, 
than the crude details of an uncertain past. For the modem 
critic to fail to appreciate the point of view of these Hebrew histo- 
rians is as grave a sin in historical criticism as to fail, on the other 
hand, to see the damage they wrought in the ancient sources. It 
was a point of view which has much to justify it too ; for but for 
the work of those prophets who sought to carry Israel away from 
its primitive line of history into new and unhistorical ideals, the 
history of Israel would never have been worth bothering over at 
all — except as that of an obscure Oriental people who contributed 
next to nothing to civilization. In the same way, if the believers in 
a coming Messiah plundered the documents of the past, the plunder 
was used for no less a purpose than the documentation of the 
kingdom of Christ. In short it was the distorters of Hebrew 
history who made that history worth our while ! 

Yet the fact remains that, from our point of view, the history 
was distorted. The paradox is not an antithesis between history 
and morals, however, or between science and religion, or science 
and theology. It is simply the statement of the difference between 
the ideals of the scientific and the pre-scientific eras. 



CHAPTER X 
THE FORMATION OF THE CANON 

There still remains the question of how this mass of Hebrew 
writings took the form and shape in which it is known to us, as the 
Old Testament. The process was a long and slow one, and part of 
it has already been traced above. We recall how the legends of 
the earUest days were first thrown into connected written narrative 
in the eighth or ninth century B.C., in the schools of the prophets, 
as J and E, how then in the close of the seventh century they were 
combined (JE) ; how, about the same time, a code was prepared in 
Jerusalem in the name of Moses (D), then promulgated in the 
eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah (621 B.C.) and shortly after- 
ward combined with the history (JED) ;^ how during the exile a new 
ritual-law, traced to the influence of Ezekiel, was responsible for a 
new and thoroughgoing recasting of the narrative from a priestly 
standpoint (P) and then how, after various changes, the whole com- 
posite mass became our Hexateuch. One might expect from this, 
that the books of the Jews would go on developing, modified to the 
changing needs of successive ages, and so, to a certain extent, they 
did. But there was one influence making strongly against change. 
The texts themselves became sacred. The use of the Law, as the 
five "books of Moses" were termed, by the priests in the actual 
administration of justice may have had something to do in this 
process of crystallization, but a deeper reason lies in the very 
mystery of "the written word," which attains an undue authority 
over all primitive minds and holds its tyranny even in the modern 
world of encyclopaedias and newspapers. What is written attains 
a life of its own, and only here and there can one find the unfeeling 
skeptic indifferent to its fate. But when the word that is written 
is regarded as the utterance of God, — as in practically all early 

* This incidentally shows how highly the historical texts were regarded, that D 
should be united with them. For D came with authority. 

108 



THE FORMATION OF THE CANON 109 

codes of law, — the skeptic has little chance to commit his sac- 
rilege.* 

In Israel this respect for the scriptures attained the dignity of a 
separate superstition, one which was destined to cast its influence 
over the whole subsequent history of Jewish and of Christian 
thought. The early scribes had felt free to arrange and annotate 
the law as part of their work. Indeed, as we have seen, the law 
itself was a product of repeated revision and rectification. But 
from about the middle of the fifth century it became fixed and rigid,^ 
the object of religious reverence which protected itself by an en- 
larged use of old taboos. The books of "the Prophets," — includ- 
ing, it will be recalled, the earHer histories, — were stereotyped into 
their canon by about two centuries later, about 250 B.C. The two 
lessons read in the synagogue were drawn, one from the law, the 
other from the prophets, so that the latter shared inevitably the 
fate of the former. The "scriptures," or "hagiographa," were 
not so easily moulded into place. The rabbis disputed long over 
what ones to accept, and were unable to come to final conclusions 
until after the Christians had begun to plunder the sacred arsenal 
for their revolt. 

The difficulty lay in the test of inclusion or exclusion, which 
was not subject-matter but authorship. Only those scriptures 
were to be admitted which had been written by God, through 
inspired mediums as in the case of Law and Prophets. Such a 
test, however, made disagreement inevitable, since there was no 
ready way of establishing or denying the inspiration. History has 
never discovered other than two possible lines of evidence for 
assigning authorship : external evidence, such as that of witnesses 
who were present when the work was written or had access to 
knowledge as to how it was written, and internal evidence from 
the nature of the text. Although it was obviously presumptuous, 
involving the danger of blasphemy, for any man to use the second 
test consciously, since he would in the circumstances be making 
himself judge of what God should be credited with saying and what 

* The same authority may attach to spoken words, but their reporters are bound 
to modify them in terms of their own time and thought. The beliefs about the logos 
occur to one in this connection. 

* Cf. Nehemiah, 8-io. 



no INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

not, nevertheless what could not be risked by the individual was 
done by the mass.^ A consensus fidelium, that ''agreement among 
all those who believe," was arrived at, as is the case with all doc- 
trines truly catholic. In this process, however, the external test 
of authorship was used to an extent which really led to a study of 
the contents of the books involved. The books, it must be ad- 
mitted, were already prepared for such a test, or readily adjusted 
themselves to it. In arrangement of time and circumstance, and 
miraculous evidences of the presence of the divine Author, the 
later books even protested somewhat too much, as the apocalyptic 
literature shows. Two historical devices were also used : ascribing 
books to authors already accepted in the canon as inspired, and the 
antedating of works to give them greater claim upon the credulity 
of the present. Psalms which were perhaps written as late as the 
Maccabean struggle were grouped with older ones, — all possibly 
being later than the Exile, — and attributed to David. Solomon 
was made responsible for wisdom of a later day, and thus poetry 
and proverb enriched the history of the royal period with a new and 
sophisticated myth. More interesting still to the historian is the 
antedating of prophecy, such as that of the book of Daniel. We 
know from its contents that it was written in the time of Antiochus 
Epiphanes (175-164 B.C.), yet it purports to come from the days 
of Nebuchadnezzar, over four centuries earlier. Upon the whole 
the exigencies of the situation produce a somewhat bewildering 
misappropriation of texts. But no higher critics were at hand, and 
the canon of the Old Testament was framed, — for two religions.^ 

^ This is an excellent example of a most important principle, familiar to sociologists 
and anthropologists, but strangely ignored by historians. All the world's history is 
affected by it. We have ordinarily considered it as belonging exclusively to a myth- 
making stage of society ; but we are still making myths and resting content with our 
consensus fidelium. 

^ The authoritative form was apparently settled for the Jews at a congress or 
council of rabbis held at Jamnia, the successor to destroyed Jerusalem, in the year 
go A.D. Josephus, however, in his book Against Apion (Bk. I, Chap. VIII), written 
93-95 A.D., states that the Old Testament has 22 books, whereas the regular Jewish 
version has 24. They are: the five books of the Law; eight books of "Prophets," 
including Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, "the twelve" major prophets, and the 
minor prophets, the latter as one book; and eleven books of "Scriptures," Psalms, 
Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra 
and Nehemiah together, Chronicles. The Christians, by dividing Samuel, Kings, 
Ezra, and Chronicles and counting the rest separately, reckon thirty-nine books, il ^ 



THE FORMATION OF THE CANON iii 

The decisions of the rabbis enabled the Christians in their turn 
to meet pagan criticism entrenched behind a sacred text, and no 
greater tribute could be paid to the work of rabbi and theologian, 
or, perhaps, to the weakness of the critical attitude in man, than 
that from that day of warring creeds to the present the citadel of 
faith and inspiration has held against the assaults of inquiry and 
historical skepticism, and still asserts an almost undiminished sway. 
The early Christians, however, did not at first pay any very strict 
attention to the opinions of the rabbis as to which of the "scrip- 
tures" were canonical and which were not. They were eager for 
them all, especially for those that bore Messianic prophecy; which 
put a premium upon some of the very ones which the rabbis were 
inclined to discard. As a matter of fact the test of authorship as 
over against that of the contents of writings again broke down. 
A new consensus fidelium had to be satisfied. "The Christians 
discovered no reason in the books themselves why Esther, for ex- 
ample, should be inspired and Judith not; or why Ecclesiastes, 
with its skepticism about the destiny of the soul, should be divinely 
revealed, and the Wisdom of Solomon, with its eloquent defence of 
immortality, a purely human production; or, again, why the 
Proverbs of Solomon were Scripture, and the Proverbs of Ben 
Sira (Ecclesiasticus) nothing but profane wisdom." ^ Christian 
scholarship did not challenge this process until Jerome prepared his 
famous text at the close of the fourth century. 

The mention of Jerome suggests the last problem to be con- 
sidered, the origin of the text as we have it now. The Christians 
used the Greek, not the Hebrew Bible. This had been translated 
into the Greek from the Hebrew ,2 by Jews of Alexandria. Legend 
had it, as also recorded m Josephus,^ that the law was translated in 
seventy-two days by seventy-two persons; hence the name Sep- 
tuagint * by which the Greek Old Testament became known. In 

1 G. F. Moore, The Literature of the Old Testament, p. 14. Cf. C. A. Briggs, General 
Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures (1899), pp. 118 sqq., and articles in Ency- 
clopcedia Britannica and Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. 

2 A few chapters in Ezra (4 «-6 '*) and Daniel (2 ^7) are in Aramaic. 
8 Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XII, Chap. II. 

* From the Latin, septuaginta, seventy. The name strictly speaking is applicable 
only to the Pentateuch. But it was loosely extended to cover the whole of the Old 
Testament. 



112 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

reality it was the work of different scholars through different ages, 
and was probably not completed before the second century B.C. 
It was from this Greek text that the Christian Bible was drawn at 
first. During the second and third century there was some stir- 
ring among Christian scholars to have a Hebrew collation. The 
greatest of these scholars, Origen, drew up a collection of six parallel 
texts/ but it was Jerome who set to work actually to procure a 
reliable Latin translation for common use in the West, based upon 
Hebrew texts, in the notion that, being Hebrew, they were more 
genuine than the Greek version, — a notion which turned out to 
be mistaken, however, since the Septuagint was in reality from 
older Hebrew texts than those used by him. In preparing this 
edition, Jerome took the Jewish point of view as to what books 
should be included as inspired and what ones should not, thus 
denying the canonicity of scriptures which were in constant use, 
and modifying texts by his new translation to the disturbance of the 
faith of believers, — as Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ventured to ad- 
monish him. 2 The Church of the Middle Ages in general tended to fol- 
low the liberal view of the churchman rather than the narrower inter- 
pretation of the scholar, and when Luther, and Protestantism follow- 
ing him, made the Hebrew Bible the test, reverting to the position of 
Jerome,^ the Catholic Church at Trent declared on the other hand 
that these works, e.g. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and the 
Maccabees, were an intrinsic part of the canonical scriptures, adding 
the usual sanction — *'If any man does not accept as sacred and 
canonical these books, entire, with all their parts, as they have been 
customarily read in the CathoUc Church and are contained in the 
ancient common Latin edition ... let him be anathema." * 

» The famous Hexapla. They were : (i) The Hebrew Text, (2) Transliteration 
of Hebrew Text into Greek Letters, (3) Greek versions of Aquila, (4) of Symmachus, 
(5) of the Septuagint, (6) of Theodotion ; 3, 4, and 6 are from the second century a.d. 

2 This correspondence between Augustine and Jerome ofiEers an illuminating sec- 
tion in Christian historiography. Augustine not only stood for the traditional text, 
he was in favor of the traditional inclusion of Judith, Tobit, First and Second Macca- 
bees, Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. Cf. De Doctrina Christiana, Bk. II, 
Chap. VIII, written 397 a.d. 

'Luther placed the Apocrypha between Old and New Testaments, with this 
further caption, "Books that are not equally esteemed with the Holy Scriptures, but 
nevertheless are profitable and good to read." 

* In the fourth session. 



THE FORMATION OF THE CANON 113 

It is easy to see how the skeptics of the eighteenth century 
might reverse the doubt of the early Christians and demand not 
why one should limit the list of inspired books but why one should 
regard any of them as inspired at all. Such doubts made possible 
genuine textual criticism, which began with Astruc in the eighteenth 
century. The development of philology and archaeology supplied 
the tools for the two-fold task of textual studies on the one hand 
and of external comparison with the rest of ancient history upon 
the other, with the result that we now know more of how the Bible 
was put together than the very scribes who copied or rabbis who 
used it in the immemorial service of the ancient synagogue ; as we 
know more of the history of Israel than the very authors who com- 
piled its last revision. 



CHAPTER XI 
NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 

The very process we have just been describing implies that we 
have only a portion of the literature of the Jews inside the canon 
of the sacred scriptures. It remains to glance at what lies outside 
it, and finally at the work of a purely secular historian who wrote 
at Rome, for the Greco-Roman world, the story of Jewish antiquity 
and the struggle for Jewish freedom, Josephus. 

The two chief characteristic products of Jewish thought, legalism 
and prophecy, which we have seen coloring with more or less dif- 
ferent hues the long perspectives of bibUcal antiquity, continued 
to determine the quality of the non-biblical literature to a very 
large degree. The result is that that literature largely consists of 
two great developments, corresponding to these two interests : the 
elaboration of the law in the Talmud and the production of apoc- 
alyptic literature. How great these two developments were is 
something of which Christians are generally grossly ignorant; 
and yet no student of New Testament history can ever quite get 
the sense of the setting of primitive Christianity, of the forces 
which it had to fight and even of those which it incorporated, until 
he has looked into the teachings of the rabbis or realized the scope 
of the poetic, rhapsodical dreams of Oriental imaginations fired 
by fanatic zeal, that were prevalent in the closing days of Judaism. 

The great body of the "oral" law, as opposed to the "written" 
law of Moses, was preserved, elaborated and debated by the rabbis, 
just as the Christian church has its bodies of ecclesiastical law in 
addition to the Old and New Testaments. How far back its pre- 
cepts really go, no one can teU ; but those who taught it believed 
that it extended back to Moses, and had existed parallel with the 
written law from the time of its deliverance,^ being passed along by 

* As a good example of rabbinical interpretation on which such conclusions rest, 
a rabbi of the third century a.d. takes Exodus 24 ^* : "I will give thee tables of stone, 
and the Law, and the Commandment, which I have written, that thou mayest teach 

114 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS "5 

word of mouth from generation to generation. The Tahnud, in 
which this "oral law" was embodied, is to the Jews like the New 
Testament to Christians, something far more than a mere commen- 
tary on the Scriptures, of an authority and influence parallel to them. 
It is made up of two parts, the Mishnah, which is a collection of texts, 
begun under the Maccabees and compiled at the end of the second 
century a.d., and the Gemara, or comments on the Mishnah. The 
discussions of the Palestinian rabbis were codified in the fourth 
century a.d. in what is called the Jerusalem Talmud. Those of 
the schools of Babylonia were codified in the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies A.D. The latter, which is about four times the size of the 
Jerusalem Talmud, is what is meant when "The Talmud" is referred 
to without further qualification. 

This mass of material, as an ostensible body of recorded tradi- 
tion, might seem to have some claim upon our attention ; but we 
have included it in this survey mainly to emphasize its essentially 
unhistorical character, and the fact that Talmudic training tends 
to block the path of historical criticism. In the first place, in spite 
of all the vast literature on the Talmud, — and no text has ever 
been studied with more intensive zeal, — it has not received that 
"higher criticism" which has led us at last to appreciate the his- 
toricity of the biblical narratives. Owing largely to the very 
fact that it was so long oral tradition, it is difficult, perhaps impos- 
sible, to determine the origin and first setting of the central texts. 
In any case this work has not yet been done, and the Talmud re- 
mains a practically sealed book to historians, who can use its wealth 
of descriptive and illustrative material — the Talmudists claim 
that its texts can meet every possible exigency in life — only in 
the most general way. Talmudic scholarship therefore tends to 
turn the mind toward that type of speculation on words and 
phrases which results in either the hair-splitting of quibbles in the 
application of theological law or the more philosophical moralizing 
that draws strength from allegory ; but neither of these tendencies 

them," and elucidates the text as follows: "'Tables,' these are the ten words (the 
Decalogue) ; the 'Law' is the Scripture; 'and the commandment,' that is the Mish- 
nah ; * which I have written, ' these are the Prophets and the Writings (the Hagi- 
ographa) ; 'to teach tnem," that is the Gemara — thus instructing us all that these were 
given to Moses from Sinai." Quoted in article Talmud in Encyclopcedia Britannica. 
Historical criticism cannot flourish in such an atmosphere. 



ii6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

leads to historical analysis. When one examines the Talmud, and 
considers the influences which it reflects from the dim antiquities 
of Jewish life, one wonders all the more at the historical product 
of the Old Testament. 

This impression is still further strengthened by a glance at the 
prophetic literature, which rivalled the influence of the Law upon 
the Jewish mind. We have seen above how this — along with the 
Law — became the vehicle for so much of that high moral teaching 
which gave the lasting value to Jewish aspirations, — aspirations 
which otherwise would hardly interest succeeding ages.^ There 
was much of this literature, and more still that did not reach the 
dignity of literature, in the later period of Jewish history.^ It was 
a great contribution, poetry fired by passion and rich in dreams, 
the outpouring of Oriental zealots, — the literature of apocalypses. 
But it gained its best triumphs by its boldest defiance of fact. True, 
its vision had power at times to supplant the mean reaHties of actual 
things by new creations, made real through that conviction which 
impels to deeds ; but the historic forces which it wielded were drawn 
more from faith in the future than from interest in the past. Proph- 
etism, as we have pointed out elsewhere, blocks the path of scientific 
inquiry ; and yet as we register its impediment to history, we cannot 
but find in it an expression — one of several, but not the least signifi- 
cant — of that fundamental difference in outlook between the Orien- 
tal and the Western mind. The Oriental has remained essentially 
unhistorical because of his relative indifference as to fact and fancy. 
His interest is determined more by what he wishes things to be 
and less by what they are. In the West, in spite of much persistence 
of the same attitude, we have grown interested in things as they actu- 
ally are, and in things as they actually were. History cannot substi- 
tute what one wishes to happen or to have happened for what actually 
happened. Its field is not free and open but sadly circumscribed, 
marked out by frustration and darkened by the dull walls of fact.^ 

* This recognition of the lasting message of Jewish Theology is the theme of many 
a recent study, since the critics have destroyed the older basis of c^^nonical authority. 
As an example may be cited W. F. Badg, The Old Testament in the Light of Today. 

2 The chief name among modem scholars in this field is that of R. H. Charles. 
His contributions need hardly be cited here, however ; and the student is referred to 
articles on Apocrypha, etc., in Bible dictionaries and encyclopaedias. 

s This inability to distinguish between what things are and what one wishes them 



_,j 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 117 



((' 



'The Law and the Prophets" are both distinctly Jewish prod- 
ucts, for, whatever they borrowed from beyond Jordan, in both cases 
they are the expression of Palestinian civilization. In the last 
phase of its history, however, Judaism, especially in the Diaspora 
or Dispersion throughout the Greco-Roman world, came to a certain 
degree under the influences of that Hellenic civilization which had 
permeated so much of the Near East after the conquests of Alex- 
ander. The result was that the Jew and Gentile were led to look 
into each other's past. The mutual challenge was hopeful for 
history. It was such a situation which, as we shall see, had opened 
the doors to Greek historical criticism in the days of Herodotus, 
when the antiquity of Egypt became the touchstone for judging 
that of Hellas. One might have thought that when the two peoples 
who really could show some achievement in antique history-writing 
— the Greeks and the Hebrews — came to know each other, the 
efifect would be to stimulate a critical appreciation of that achieve- 
ment and so further the cause of scientific history ; that, at least, 
if the Hebrews did not profit from the contact, the Greeks would. 
How they escaped doing so, — and by so doing to anticipate by 
twenty centuries the biblical criticism of today, — is apparent 
from a consideration of the work of the two outstanding figures 
of Hellenic Judaism, Philo the philosopher and Josephus the 
historian. 

Philo Judaeus, as he is commonly termed, was a product of 
Alexandria, a contemporary of Christ.^ He comes into our survey, 
not because of any contribution which he offered to the history 
of History, but because of his influence in furthering that essentially 
unhistorical habit of thought to which we have referred above, by 
interpreting texts by way of allegory. It was a method which 
Christian writers were to develop to such an extent that we may 
leave the fuller consideration of it until we come to the work of 

to be is a characteristic of all immature or undisciplined minds. It is a factor in cur- 
rent world-politics, to be borne in mind in the entry of backward people into the 
society of nations. They can readily use the same language of political rastitutions 
but ^e sense of fact is not always the same. 

^ We know almost nothing of his life, beyond an incident or two. He was bom 
about the second decade before Christ and was in Rome in 40 a.d. on a mission for 
the Alexandrian Jews. His works, however, have been preserved in surprisingly full 
form. See article Philo in Encyclopedia Britannica. 



ii8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Origen and the "apologists." But, although Philo seems to have 
had little direct influence upon later Christian writers ^ — probably 
because he was a Jew, — the contribution which he offered to the 
world of his time, Jew and Greek, was so distinctive as to demand 
attention. For Philo applied the familiar device of allegory not 
simply to explain the texts but to explain them away, by boldly 
taking them over from history to philosophy. 

One or two examples, out of an almost unlimited number, will 
suflace to show how the commentary on the Pentateuch runs, as it 
takes up the text verse by verse. The Allegories of the Sacred 
Laws begins as foUows : 

"'And the heaven and the earth and all their world was completed.'* 
Having previously related the creation of the mind and of sense, Moses now 
proceeds to describe the perfection which was brought about by them both. 
And he says that neither the indivisible mind nor the particular sensations 
received perfection, but only ideas, one the idea of the mind, the other of sen- 
sation. And, speaking symboUcally, he calls the mind heaven, since the na- 
tures which can only be comprehended by the intellect are in heaven. And 
sensation he calls earth, because it is sensation which has obtained a corporeal 
and somewhat earthy constitution. The ornaments of the mind are called the 
incorporeal things, which are perceptible only by the intellect. Those of sen- 
sation are the corporeal things, and everything in short which is perceptible 
by the external senses. 

"'And on the sixth day God finished his work which he had made.' It 
would be a sign of great simphcity to think that the world was created in six 
days or indeed at all in time; because all time is only the space of days and 
nights, and these things the motion of the sun as he passes over the earth and 
under the earth does necessarily make. But the svm is a portion of heaven, 
so that one must confess that time is a thing posterior to the world. There- 
fore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that 
time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the 
heaven that has displayed the nature of time. 

"When, therefore, Moses says, 'God completed his works on the sixth 
day,' we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that 
he takes six as a perfect number. Since it is the first number which is equal 
in its parts, in the half, and the third and sixth parts, and since it is produced 
by the multiplication of two unequal factors, two and three. And the numbers 
two and three exceed the incorporeaUty which exists in the unit ; because the 

1 There are almost no manuscripts of his works in mediaeval ecclesiastical libraries. 
Cf. M. R. James, The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (191 7), Introduction. This is a 
pseudo-Philo summary of the Pentateuch of the end of the first century a.d. 

^ Genesis 2 *. 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 119 

number two is an image of matter being divided into two parts and dissected 
like matter. And the number three is an image of a solid body, because a 
soUd can be divided according to a threefold division. Not but what it is also 
akin to the motions of organic animals. For an organic body is naturally 
capable of motion in six directions, forward, backwards, upwards, downwards, 
to the right, and to the left. And at all events he desires to show that the 
races of mortal, and also of all the immortal beings, exist according to their 
appropriate numbers ; measuring mortal beings, as I have said, by the number 
six, and the blessed and immortal beings by the number seven. First, there- 
fore, having desisted from the creation of mortal creatures on the seventh 
day, he began the formation of other and more divine beings." * 

When one considers that such speculations are the matured 
contribution of one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, one sees 
how far adrift theology might go from the sober world of fact and 
the processes of history. And theology was to capture the in- 
tellectual interests of the age. 

Sometimes Philo recognizes the statement of fact in the narra- 
tive but even that is the material veil for some divine truth. For 
instance, the rivers of the Garden of Eden may be real rivers, — 
though the inadequacy of the geography of Genesis is troublesome, 
— but the escape is always at hand, for the four rivers are the signs 
of the four virtues. Prudence, Temperance, Courage and Justice, 
flowing from the central stream of the Divine Wisdom.^ Reading 
such a passage one recalls the jeers of Herodotus at the geographers 
who held to the Homeric cosmography and especially the Ocean 
Stream encircling the world ; ^ but by no flight of imagination can 
one think of Herodotus solving his difficulties by transmuting 
rivers into ideas. The divergence between the paths of history 
and philosophy is fortunately thus sufficiently clear at the start 
that we need not stray longer from the one before us. 

Flavins Josephus stands out as the very opposite of Philo. 
He was a man-of -affairs, warrior, statesman and diplomatist. 
He was one of the leaders of the great Jewish revolt, but made his 
peace with Vespasian and became a favorite of the Flavian imperial 
family, from whom he took his adopted name. After the destruction 

^ Philo Judaeus, The Allegories of the Sacred Laws, Bk. I, Chaps. I-II. (Translated 
by C. D. Yonge in Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library.) 

* Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XIX. C/. also Questions and Solutions, Bk. I, Chap. XII. 
» Vide infra, Chap. XIH. 



120 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

of Jerusalem he passed most of his life at Rome, and there wrote 
in Greek ^ for the Greco-Roman world, a history of The Wars of the 
Jews, and a long account of The Antiquities of the Jews, as well as 
a defence of Jewish historical sources and methods against the 
attacks of Greeks, especially one Apion, in a treatise Against Apion.^ 
In addition he wrote his own biography, as a reply to attacks upon 
him by his own people. Thus the man whom the Jews most hated 
as a betrayer of his country in his own day became the defender 
of its past. But he has never been popular among the Jews. His 
readers were mainly among the heathen and the Christian. Among 
them his vogue was surprisingly large, considering his theme. His 
works have survived as few from that age have, almost as though 
he had been a Christian Father. 

Josephus' own life enters so much into his writings that it tends 
to distract one from considering them on their own merits. He 
was bom 37-38 a.d. of high-priestly stock, and studied for the 
priesthood. He was a prominent young Pharisee when sent to 
Rome on a successful mission to plead for some Jews in the year 
63-64. Then he was drawn into the Great Rebellion, becoming one 
of the leaders, but turned to the Roman side after his capture, 
saving his hfe indeed by prophesying that Vespasian would be 
emperor. The favor of the Flavians never failed him after that, 
in spite of constant attacks upon him by the Jews. This shifty — 
and thrifty — career is reflected in the first of his works, the history 
of the Jewish War, which was written between 69 and 79 a.d., at 
once a court history and an apology. 

The Wars of the Jews is an elaborate work in seven books, of 
which the first two trace the history of the Jews from the capture 
of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes to the war of 67 a.d. In 
this portion he relies on some previous historians, such as Nicholas 
of Damascus,' and does not venture far afield. The remaining 
books are based on contemporary sources and personal knowledge, 

1 His early Aramaic account of The Wars of the Jews is lost. He tells us in the 
introduction that he translated it into Greek (Sect, i), but the relation of this Ara- 
maic version to the text we have is not known. 

2 Apion was the leader of an Alexandrian mission opposing Philo. In this in- 
cident, therefore, we have a link between the philosopher and the historian. 

' Nicholas of Damascus was a Greek savant who became friend and adviser to 
Herod the Great and who played a considerable part in the diplomacy and politics 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 121 

and should be read along with his Life. He states that he sub- 
mitted the history to Titus, who indorsed it, as well he might, 
for Josephus absolves him from blame for firing the Temple,^ al- 
though Tacitus indicates that he gave definite orders to do so ; and 
in general charges the Zealots, who were the misguided Jewish 
patriots, with the real responsibihty for the disaster to their nation. 
Providence is visibly on the side of the great battalions. 

The Antiquities of the Jews is a much more ambitious work,^ 
one of the longest individual products in antique literature. In 
twenty long books, Josephus traces, for those who are unfamiliar 
with the Bible, — and the ignorance of the classical world about 
the Jews was very great,^ — the story of the Jewish past. His chief 
source was the Septuagint, the Greek edition of the Old Testament,* 
but in addition he added from that store of tradition passed along 
among those learned in the law. He also brings in profane testi- 
mony, using Herodotus, for instance, for the story of Cyrus,^ and 
many Roman sources for the later part. He works these over, 
however, and fits them into his story so that it is a work of textual 
criticism — into which we need not enter — to trace the actual 
process of composition. 

This brings us to consider his style. Like Polybius, he is con- 
scious of his weakness in art ; but hopes to make up for it by the 
content. He promises, in the preface to the Wars^ to conceal noth- 

of the Near East under Augustus. His historical writings included a biography of 
Augustus of which but slight fragments remain, and a Universal History in one 
hundred forty-two books, dealing with the Assyrians, Lydians, Greeks, Medes and 
Persians, and concentrating upon the history of Herod and his own time. Josephus 
used this latter part in detail, while criticising Nicholas for his highly flattering and 
unreliable account of his patron's reign. The fragments of the Universal History are 
preserved in C. Miiller. Fragmenta Historicorum Gracorum (5 vols., 1841-1873), Vol. 
in, pp. 343-464 ; Vol. IV, pp. 661-668, and in L. Dindorf, Historici Grmci Minores 
(2 vols., 1870-1871), Vol. I, pp. 1-153. Cf. E. Schiirer, Geschichte des jiidischen 
Volkes imZdtalter Jesu Christi (3 vols, and index, 3d and 4th ed., 1901-1911), Vol. I, 

pp. 50-57- 

1 Cf. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Bk. VI, Chap. VI, Sect. 2 (in The Works of 
Flavins Josephus , trans, by W. Whiston) . Cf. Sulpicus Severus, Chronica, Bk . II, Chap. 
XXX ; Orosius, Historiarum Adversutn Paganos Libri Septetn, Bk. VII, Chap. IX. 

2 Note the opening words of the first chapter. 

' Vide T. Reinach, Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains relatifs aujudatsme (1895). 

* It is doubtful if he knew Hebrew. Cf. B. Niese's article Josephus in Encyclopcedia 
of Religion and Ethics (edited by J. Hastings, 1908-1919), Vol. VU. 

* Cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XI, Chap. II. 



122 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

ing nor add " anything to the known truth of things." ^ "I have 
written it down," he says, "for . . . those that love truth, but not 
for those who please themselves (with fictitious relations) ." ^ " How 
good the style is must be left to the determination of the readers ; 
but as for the agreement with the facts, I shall not scruple to say, 
and that boldly, that truth hath been what I have alone aimed 
at throughout its entire composition." ^ In the face of such prot- 
estations one is reluctantly obliged to come to the conclusion that 
Josephus was as disingenuous about his style as about the sub- 
stance, — which, we have just seen, was badly twisted for his own 
defence. For he was a florid writer, trying out successfully all the 
devices of the literary art of his day with which he was famihar. 
He invents speeches for the biblical heroes, as for those of later 
days ; ^ he strives for effect by exaggeration, using figures, as some 
one has said of a statesman of our own time, like adjectives : the 
Jews killed at Jerusalem number 1,100,000,^ whereas Tacitus puts 
the total number of the besieged at the outside figure of 600,000.^ 
He elaborates on the statesmanship of Moses, ^ until one feels that 
it is just a Httle overdone. Yet those of his own day liked it, and 
that is its justification; so that even the little self -apologetic 
touches, concerning his sad awkwardness in Greek, may have added 
to the total effect, — especially as he deftly combines this with an 
appeal to take him at his word in the subject-matter. Take for 
instance these closing words of his great Antiquities : 

" And I am so bold as to say, now I have so completely perfected the work I 
proposed to myself to do, that no other person, whether he were a Jew or a 
foreigner, had he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliver 
these accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books. For those of my own 
nation freely acknowledge, that I far exceed them in the learning belonging 
to Jews ; I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the 
Greeks, and understand the elements of the Greek language, although I have 
so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue, that I cannot pronounce 

^ Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Preface, Sect. 10. 
'Kid., Sect. 12. 

Ubid., Bk. VII, Chap. XI, Sect. 5. 

* Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XIX, Sect. 4 ; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. U, 
Joseph's speeches, etc. 

' Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Bk. VI, Chap. IX, Sect. 3, 

« Tacitus, Historiae, Bk. V, Chap. XIII. 

^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bks. II, HI, IV. 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 123 

Greek with sufficient exactness ; for our nation does not encourage those that 
learn the languages of many nations, and so adorn their discourses with the 
smoothness of their periods ; because they look upon this sort of accomplish- 
ment as common, not only to all sorts of freemen, but to as many of the servants 
as please to learn them. But they give him the testimony of being a wise man, 
who is fully acquainted with our laws, and is able to interpret their meaning; 
on which account, as there have been many who have done their endeavors 
with great patience to obtain this learning, there have yet hardly been so many 
as two or three that have succeeded therein, who were immediately well re- 
warded for their pains. "^ 

Josephus was relatively free from the impediments that blocked 
the path of more religious natures to the consideration of mere 
matters-of-fact. But there is a touch of the difficulty in his com- 
ment on Daniel which is worth a passing attention. He says that 
Daniel '* not only prophesied of future events, as did the other 
prophets, but also determined the time of their accomplishment." ^ 
The problem was here presented of working out the numbered 
years of the divine plan, which was to absorb so much of the specu- 
lation of later ages and which projected chronology into the future 
instead of establishing it in the past. Had Josephus been a thinker 
rather than a student, he would have followed the lead here given, 
into unhistorical grounds. Fortunately, he was a historian in- 
stead of a philosopher. 

There remains one work to consider, and that the most interest- 
ing of all to the historian of History, the treatise Against Apion, 
written to challenge the gentile historians for their failure to ap- 
preciate the history of the Jews, and to justify its authenticity. It 
is anticipating here to quote the criticism of Greek historiography 
with which the treatise opens, and yet as it contains so much that 
is still suggestive and sound, it may serve as a connecting link with 
the next part of our story ,^ and as a discriminating survey of antique 
historiography, in general, it justifies quotation at length : ^ 

^Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XX, Chap. XI, Sect. 2. (Whiston's 
translation.) 

2 Ibid., Bk. X, Chap. XI, Sect. 7. 

' This is a disadvantage due to the treatment of the different national histories as 
entities rather than in a comparative, chronological survey. But after all the ante- 
cedents of the Greco-Roman writers were national. 

* Josephus, Against Apion, Bk. I, Chaps. II-VI. (Whiston's translation, revised 
by A. R. Shilleto in Bohn's Standard Library.) 



124 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

"I cannot but greatly wonder at t^ose who think that we must attend to 
none but Greeks as to the most ancient facts, and learn the truth from them 
only, and that we are not to beUeve ourselves or other men. For I am convinced 
that the very reverse is the case, if we will not follow vain opinions, but extract 
the truth from the facts themselves. For you will find that almost all which 
concerns the Greeks happened not long ago, nay, one may say, is of yesterday 
and the day before only ; I speak of the bxiilding of their cities, the inventions 
of their arts, and the recording of their laws ; and as for their care about com- 
piling histories, it is very nearly the last thing they set about. Indeed they 
admit themselves that it is the Egj^Jtians, the Cbaldaeans and the Phoenicians 
(for I will not now include ourselves among those) that have preserved the 
memory of the most ancient and lasting tradition. For all these nations in- 
habit such countries as are least subject to destruction from the cUmate and 
atmosphere, and they have also taken especial care to have nothing forgotten 
of what was done among them, but their history was esteemed sacred, and ever 
written in the pubhc records by men of the greatest wisdom. Whereas ten 
thousand destructions have afflicted the country which the Greeks inhabit, 
and blotted out the memory of former actions ; so that, ever beginning a new 
way of living, they supposed each of them that their mode of life originated 
with themselves. It was also late, and with difficulty, that they came to know 
the use of letters. For those who would trace their knowledge of letters to the 
greatest antiquity, boast that they learned them from the Phoenicians and from 
Cadmus. But nobody is able to produce any writing preserved from that 
time, either in the temples or in any other pubhc monuments ; and indeed the 
time when those lived who went to the Trojan war so many years afterwards 
is in great doubt, and it is a question whether the Greeks used letters at that 
time; and the most prevaihng opinion, and that nearest the truth, is, that 
they were ignorant of the present way of using letters. Certainly there is 
not any writing among them, which the Greeks agree to be genuine, ancienter 
than Homer's poems. And he plainly was later than the siege of Troy : and 
they say that even he did not leave his poems in writing, but that their memory 
was preserved in songs, and that they were afterwards collected together, and 
that that is the reason why such a number of variations are found in them. 
As for those who set about writing histories among them, such I mean as Cadmus 
of MUetus, and Acusilaus of Argos, and any others that may be mentioned after 
him, they Uved but a short time before the Persian expedition into Greece. 
Moreover, as to those who first philosophized as to things celestial and divine 
among the Greeks, as Pherecydes the Syrian, and Pythagoras, and Thales, all 
with one consent agree, that they learned what they knew from the Egyptians 
and Chaldaeans, and wrote but little. And these are the things which are sup- 
posed to be the oldest of all among the Greeks, and they have much ado to 
believe that the writings ascribed to those men are genuine.* 

" How can it then be other than an absurd thing for the Greeks to be so 

* C/. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Preface, Sect. 5. 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 125 

proud, as if they were the only people acquainted with antiquity, the only 
people that have banded down the truth about those early times in an accurate 
manner? Nay, who is there that cannot easily gather from the Greek writers 
themselves, that they knew but little on good foundation when they set about 
writing, but rather jotted down their own conjectures as to facts? Accord- 
ingly they frequently confute one another in their own books, and do not hesi- 
tate to give us the most contradictory accoimts of the same things. But I 
should spend my time to little purpose, if I should teach the Greeks what they 
know better than I already, what great discrepancy there is between Hellanicus 
and Acusilaiis as to their genealogies, in how many cases Acusilaus corrects 
Hesiod, or how Ephorus demonstrates Hellanicus to have told Ues in most of 
his history ; or how Timaeus in like manner contradicts Ephorus, and the suc- 
ceeding writers Timaeus, and all writers Herodotus. Nor could Timaeus agree 
with Antiochus and PhiUstus and CaUias about SiciUan history, any more than 
do the several writers of the Atthidae foUow one another as to Athenian aflfairs, 
nor do the historians that wrote on Argolic history coincide about the aflfairs 
of the Argives. And now what need I say any more about particular cities 
and smaller places, when in the most approved writers of the expedition of 
the Persians, and of the actions done in it, there are such great diflferences? 
Nay, Thucydides himself is accused by some as often writing what is false, 
although he seems to have given us the most accurate history of the aflfairs 
of his own times. 

" As for the causes of such great discrepancy, many others may perhaps 
appear probable to those who wish to investigate the matter, but I attach the 
greatest importance to two which I shall mention. And first I shall mention 
what seems to me the principal cause, namely, the fact that from the beginning 
the Greeks were careless about pubUc records of what was done on each occa- 
sion, and this would natvirally pave the way for error, and give those that wished 
to write on old subjects opportunity for lying. For not only were records neg- 
lected by the other Greeks, but even among the Athenians themselves also, 
who pretend to be Autochthons, and to have appKed themselves to learning, 
there aje no such records extant, but they say the laws of Draco concerning 
murders, which are now extant in writing, are the most ancient of their public 
records, yet Draco hved only a little before the tyrant Pisistratus. For as to 
the Arcadians, who make such boasts of their antiquity, why need I mention 
them, since it was still later before they learned their letters, and that with 
difl&culty also? 

"There must, therefore, naturally arise great diflferences among writers, 
when no records existed, which might at once inform those who desired to 
learn, and refute those that would tell lies. However, we must assign a second 
cause, besides the former one, for these discrepancies. Those who were the ' \ 
most zealous to write history were not solicitous for the discovery of truth, ^ 
although it is very easy always to make such a profession, but they tried to dis- 
play their fine powers of writing, and in whatever manner of writing they 
thought they were able to exceed others, to that did they apply themselves. 



126 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Some betook themselves to the writing of fabiiloxis narrations ; some endea- 
voured to please cities or kings by writing in their commendation; others fell 
to finding faults with transactions, or with the writers of such transactions, 
and thought to make a great figure by so doing. However, such do what is 
of all things the most contrary to true history. For it is the characteristic of 
true history, that all both speak and write the same about the same things, 
whereas, these men, by writing differently about the same things, thought 
they would be supposed to write with the greatest regard to truth. We must 
indeed yield to the Greek writers as to language and style of composition, but 
not as regards the truth of ancient history, and least of all as to the national 
customs of various countries. 

"As to the care of writing down the records from the earUest antiquity, 
that the priests were intrusted with that function, and philosophized about it, 
among the Egyptians and Babylonians, and the Chaldaeans also among the 
Babylonians, and that the Phoenicians, who especially mixed with the Greeks, 
made use of letters both for the common affairs of life, and for handing down 
the history of public transactions, I think I may omit any proof of this, because 
all men allow it to be so. But I shall endeavour briefly to show that our fore- 
fathers took the same care about writing their records (for I will not say they 
took greater care than the others I spoke of) and that they committed that 
office to their high priests and prophets, and that these records have been writ- 
ten all along down to our own times with the utmost accuracy, and that, if it 
be not too bold for me to say so, our history will be so written hereafter." 

Josephus then goes on to argue the superiority of a people who 
have "not ten thousand books disagreeing with and contradicting 
one another, but only twenty-two books, which contain the records 
of all time and are justly believed to be divine." ^ We cannot 
follow him further in the argument, but must recall the value of 
the succeeding chapters for more than Hebrew historiography, 
since embedded in them are the selections from gentile writers, 
especially Manetho and Berossos, which are our only source for 
them. The pamphlet is the learned work of a clever man. 

The last, and greatest, of the Jewish historians, Flavius Josephus, 
recalls, strangely enough, the last and greatest of the historians 
of Egypt and Babylonia-Assyria, Manetho and Berossos. Josephus 
too, as a historian, was more a product of the Greco-Roman world 
than of the direct antecedents of his own national culture. All 
three were stimulated to write the history of their countries by the 
desire to make it known to the Gentile. But Josephus goes beyond 

* Josephus, Against Apion, Bk. I, Sect. 8. 



NON-BIBLICAL LITERATURE; JOSEPHUS 127 

them in achievement, and brings to mind still more the last of 
the great Greek historians, Polybius,^ whose life, indeed, was singu- 
larly like his own. Both wrote their histories at Rome as high 
favorites of those who had crushed out the last movement of freedom 
in their native lands ; and both profited from being on the defensive 
among an alien people, whom they had to impress by sound method 
and weight of evidence. The result was to make of the Greek 
and the Jew not only historians but historical critics, and to that 
degree moderns among the ancients. We see again here another 
illustration of the point we have touched upon before, that it is 
not so much the long procession of the centuries which produces 
the historian as the need to convince one's contemporaries of the 
truth of what one teUs. The mere possession of a mighty past is 
of less value than a critical audience. 

1 Vide Chap. XVI. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Articles in the larger Encyclopaedias (especially the Jewish Encyclopedia) 
furnish the best introduction to a study of the Talmud. A most useful manual 
is H. L. Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud (4th ed., 1908) with bibliography. 
There is an English translation of the Talmud by M. L. Rodkinson (20 vols., 
1918) and a comprehensive German translation by L. Goldschmidt, Der baby- 
lonische Talmud (8 vols., 1897-19 17). 

On this whole period of Jewish history, the classical work is E. Schiirer's 
Geschichte des jiidischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (3 vols, and index, 
3d and 4th ed., 1901-1911; tr. 1897-1898). The Uterature dealing with 
Philo is summarized in the notable article, Philo, in the Encyclopcsdia Bri- 
tannica. Those of his works of interest to the student of history have been 
translated by C. D. Yonge, in Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library. 

The works of Josephus are available in several editions. The Greek text 
by B. Niese (7 vols., 1887-1895) remains standard, and the Teubner edition 
is based on it. The full bibhography in Schiirer is still of value. The trans- 
lation by W. Whiston, a classic in itself, from the first part of the eighteenth 
century, has been reprinted several times. It has been slightly revised by 
A. R. Shilleto (1889-1890). A Latin text of the tract Against A pion is 
available, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (1898), Vol. 
XXXVII, edited by K. Boysen. 



SECTION III 
GREEK HISTORY 

CHAPTER XII 

FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 

When we come to Greece we at once think of "Homer," and 
recent discoveries, which have remade our perspectives of Greek 
history, but confirm the world-old impression. The archaeologist 
has unearthed Troys before Troy, but he has found no pre-Homeric 
Homer. Although now the centuries stretch away beyond the 
days of Agamemnon in long millenniums, and the ruined walls of 
Cnossus and Hissarlik are marked with the flow and ebb of many 
wars and the movements of dim, prehistoric peoples, no trace of 
Minoan epics has been found. Delicately frescoed walls and master- 
pieces of the goldsmith's art remain to tell us of the splendor of the 
sea-lords of Crete or the rich cattle-lords of the Argive plain, but 
the one great tale which the Greeks preserved of that "Pelasgian" 
past was of its overthrow. What they knew of the ancient civiliza- 
tion which preceded their own was sHght enough. In the Homeric 
poems there are hngering traces of the splendor of Mycenae and 
idyllic gUmpses of the island-dwellers, but the heroes are of a later 
day and a different race. And yet, slight as they are, those traces 
are so true to what the spade reveals, that some source must have 
kept alive the story from the great days of Crete (Middle Minoan) 
to those of Homer.^ Moreover, two of the most scholarly researchers 
of Greece, still centuries later, Aristotle and Ephorus, speak with 
such seeming confidence and reasonable accuracy of the age of 
Minos, that one is forced to suppose that Minoan culture left some 

1 Archaeology is steadily, if slowly, bridging the gulf from the "historic" to the 
prehistoric periods. See Arthur Evans' survey of progress : The Minoan and Mycenaan 
Element in Hellenic Life in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. XXXII (1912), pp. 
277 sqq. 

128 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 129 

genuine, historic documents. What they were no one knows. It 
is the hope of historians that when Minoan script can be deciphered, 
the tablets which have been found in the palace of Cnossus will 
prove to contain, along with business records of the kings, some 
sort of royal annal like those of Assyria and Babylonia. But so 
far "Homer" remains, in spite of archaeology, what it has been fronl 
long before the days of Herodotus, the earliest account of the Greek 
past ; and, although we shall find the real origins of Greek history- 
writing rather in a criticism of Homeric legends than in the legends 
themselves, scholars are agreed today that in main outlines the 
Homeric epics are based upon real events. The tale of the siege 
of Troy may be a free treatment of diverse incidents from the story 
of the Hellenic "migrations," and the present text be but a local 
variation of rival sagas which chance and Athenian culture secured 
for posterity, but in the picture of society and in the very tangle 
of the story there is much of genuine historical value. The Iliad 
furnishes light upon the finds of the archaeologist as archaeology 
throws light upon the historicity of the Iliad} 

It is no part of a history of History to discuss the still unsolved 
question, "Who wrote the Homeric poems? "^ The personality 
of the blind bard, that dim but pathetic figure, which all antiquity 
honored as the supreme epic genius of Greece, has suffered from 
the attacks of a century of criticism, but is apparently recovering 
once more in a reaction against too sweeping skepticism.^ It was in 

* On these questions see G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler, Hellenic Civilization 
(1915), in this series. 

^ This problem has often received undue emphasis in the field of historiography. 
It does not properly belong there, since history began less in the epic than in criticism 
of the epic. The influence of Homer upon Greek ideas and thought is naturally of 
supreme interest to historians, but that does not make the Odyssey or the Iliad history. 

' Cf. G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler, Hellenic Civilization, Chap. I, Sect. 3. 
Botsford sums up his position as follows : " We may suppose that songs and perhaps 
other literature descriptive of the splendors of Minoan life passed down into the 
Middle Age, which followed the Minoan period, and into the language of the Hellenes, 
and that Hellenic bards on the Greek mainland and in the colonies continued to sing 
the glories of gods and heroes, intermingling their own customs and ideas with tradi- 
tions. The greatest of these bards was Homer, who lived in Asia Minor, perhaps in 
the ninth or eighth century. He incorporated nothing, but created his great poems 
afresh, making use, however, of much traditional matter. The Odyssey was composed 
after the Iliad; yet both may have been the product of one genius. After their com- 
pletion by Homer the poems were to some extent interpolated." 



I30 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

1795 that Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) published his epoch- 
making Prolegomena ad Homerum in which the unity of the poems 
was attacked and ''Homer" was dethroned from his supreme 
position.^ During the nineteenth century the poems have been 
studied from every possible angle, and as the study of compara- 
tive mythology and folk-lore developed alongside the progress of 
philology, the tendency was to view them more and more as folk- 
tales, welded into shape by various poets and at different times. 
If a note of personal authorship seemed to dominate, one might 
fall back upon the fact that these were the tales of a folk so keenly 
individualistic that the quahty of personality could not fail but 
shine through the social expression. Indeed these two elements, the 
individual and the general, give the poems their double charm and 
have assured their preservation not only by the Greeks but by those 
who learned Greek to know them. They carry with them the vision 
of beauty and the Uving fire of genius and at the same time take on 
that universal outlook and interest which mark out the folk-tale from 
the individual creation. We have pointed out how records engraved 
upon stone endure while traditions change ; but here was a tradition 
whose words themselves acquired immortality, engraved, not simply 
in the memory, but in the whole intellectual life of a people. 

The Homeric poems were to the Greeks — so far as history 
goes — almost what the Old Testament was to the Jews. Their 
authority was fastened upon the Greek mind down to the era of 
its full intellectual development. The early Christian Fathers 
accepted them in this light, devoting their energies merely to prove 
that the narrative of Moses was prior to that of the Greeks.^ It 
is a singular parallel that modern scholarship developed the higher 
criticism of Homer and Moses side by side,^ and applying with im- 

1 On Wolf, see especially S. Reiter in Neiie Jahrbiicher fur das klassische Alter- 
tum, Vol. XIII (1904), PP- 89 sqq. 

2 Not the least interesting passages bearing upon this authority of Homer are the 
sections of Justin Martyr's Appeal to the Greeks {Ad Grcecos Cohortatio), in which he 
places Homer alongside Plato as the two main sources of pagan theology. Justin 
ingeniously proves, with the display of considerable learning, that Homer as well 
as Plato borrowed the better side of the Greek system from Moses. This line of 
argument was followed by many a Christian Father and ultimately worked into sys- 
tematic shape, as in Eusebius' chronicle (Chronicorum Liber Primus). 

^ Especially through the influence of F. A. Wolf upon Germany's scholarship at 
the end of the eighteenth century. 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 131 

partial judgment the same tests to both, has revealed in each case 
the same art of composite authorship and the gradual formation 
of canon. Whether Pisistratus, who was credited with having 
got the speciaUsts in Homer together, in the sixth century, for the 
preparation of an orthodox text, was really the Nehemiah of the 
Greeks or not,^ the great scholars at Alexandria seem to have been 
finally responsible for the text as we have it. For not only are the 
Iliad and the Odyssey composite poems built out of materials of 
various origins, but the poems which have survived are only parts of 
wide cycles of the "Homeric" saga. Local poets adapted and con- 
tinued the poems to suit the audience. "Every self-respecting 
city sought to connect itself through its ancient clans with the 
Homeric heroes." ^ It is no wonder that many cities claimed to be 
the birthplace of the legendary poet ; doubtless many were ! 

Alongside "Homer" stands "Hesiod," somewhat as a Words- 
worth would stand alongside a mightier Scott. Hesiod comes but 
indirectly within our survey, through the influence of his poems 
upon subsequent writers. He is no minstrel with a tale, but a 
peasant moralizer with a gift of homely wisdom and an interest in 
theology. His poems attempt no sustained and glorious flight. 
His Works and Days are the "works and days" of a simple Boeotian 
farmer, interested in his crops, the weather and the injustice of 
men. The Theogony, the opening chapter of the Greek Genesis, 
tells the story of the birth of the gods and their dealings with men. 
Neither would be mentioned in a history of History on its own 
account were it not that in the Works and Days one finds the first 
statement of that familiar scheme of the ages, into the age of gold, 
of silver, of bronze and of iron,^ which has beguiled the fancy of 
so many a dreamer in later centuries, — in that long "age of iron" 
in which all dreamers live ; and that in the Theogony we are given a 
straightforward account of the myth basis of the ancient Greek 
idea of the origins of society. Hesiod furnishes us, therefore, in 
the one poem with a framework for the successive epochs of social 

^ Gilbert Murray doubts it. See his short but suggestive survey of the growth 
of the Homeric canon in his History of Ancient Greek Literature, pp. lo sqq. 
2 J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (1909), p. 2. 
* With a Homeric age thrown in between bronze and iron. 



132 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

development, a scheme of world-history, and in the other a picture 
of those divine factors which account for the process itself. In 
short, we have a philosophy of history, — unphilosophical and un- 
historical, — although in the Hellenic Genesis mankind loses the 
Eden of the gods slowly and by the very character of successive 
cultures. There is the germ of a gospel of Rousseau in the outlook 
of Hesiod. 

But none of this is history. Homer no more than Hesiod. It is 
poetry, romance, art, the creation of imagination, the idealization 
of both realities and dreams. History began in another and more 
obscure setting. Indeed, in a sense this poetic material blocked 
its path. From the standpoint of science art overdid itself; the 
poems were too well done. They prevented the Greeks from look- 
ing for any other narrative, — for what could the past offer so 
satisfactory, so glorious as the deeds of the saga which everybody 
knew and the golden age of gods and men in which every one be- 
lieved? So the past was clothed with the colors of romance. It 
held something more than the good old days. A magic of antique 
Arabian Nights lay beyond its misty boundary, and the tales one 
told of it were for entertainment rather than for instruction. The 
present was an age of iron — it always is ; but the gleam of the 
age of gold could still be caught — as it can even today — when 
the memory was a poem. If the epics stimulated a sense of the 
past they perverted it as well. The perspective of the early ages 
of Hellas, as seen in them, stretched by real cities and dealt with real 
heroes, but they included as well so much fantastic material that 
the genuine exploits could not be distinguished from those invented 
to suit the audience. 

There is another way in which the poetry which was the glory of 
early Greek literature seems to have hindered the development of 
history. It placed the emphasis upon individuals. No epic can 
have as its subject the origins of a civic constitution ; it must deal 
with men, with Hfe and death and great exploits and the rapt 
tragedy of haunting fate. History may include all this, but it is 
more. It deals with society as such, with politics and the sober 
commonplace of business ; it records the changes in the adminis- 
tration of the city and the hardships of the debtors in the days 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 133 

of rising prices as well as the raids of robber cattle-lords. Now, 
whether it was owing to the epics or not, the Greeks while keenly- 
alert about the politics of the present, were, down to the latter part 
of the sixth century and even later, satisfied with what Homer 
had to tell them of their origin. This is long after they had de- 
veloped more than one compHcated poHtical structure. Highly 
organized states, filled with a critical, inquisitive and sophisticated 
citizenship, still accepted the naive traditions of their past, and 
continued building upon the general theme still newer myths to 
connect themselves with the ancient heroes. 

It is difiicult to realize that no real history, in our sense of the 
word, was produced in Greece until in the climax of its civihzation. 
The theme of the first prose writers continued to be Uke that of 
the poets, less politics than the story of heroes or noble clans. 
Herodotus himself was the first political historian, the first to deal 
in systematic form with the evolution of states and the affairs 
of nations ; and Herodotus, after all, came late. One forgets that 
the naive tales of the Father of History were composed far along 
in Grecian history, in the age of Pericles and by the friend of 
Sophocles. Athens had already achieved democracy, the creations 
of such men as Solon, Cleisthenes or even Aristides were already 
things of the past, before a political history was written. 

It was not because the Greeks lacked curiosity as to their past, 
that their performance in history-writing was so long delayed. The 
trouble was that their curiosity was satisfied by something else 
than history. What they needed to develop history and historians 
was criticism, skeptical criticism, instead of blind acceptance of the 
old authority. This criticism first showed itself in the cities of 
Ionia, and with it came into existence not only history but that 
new intellectual life, that vita nuova, which marks out the achieve- 
ments of the Hellenic genius from all the previous history of the 
human mind, — that philosophy which was science, and that science 
which was art. 

The scene of this renaissance was not Athens nor anywhere 
on the mainland of Greece. Farther to the east, where the rocky 
coast of Asia crumbles and plunges into the ^gean, lay the cities 
of the Ionian Greeks. A Httle fringe of cities, a half-dozen or so, 



134 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

on hill-crest or by the deep waters of half-hidden bays, these settle- 
ments played no role in the political history of the world like the 
states of the Nile or Euphrates valleys. They had no great career 
of conquest and erected no empire. Few, even today, have ever 
heard of them. And yet the history of civilization owes to them a 
debt hardly less than to Egypt or Babylon. It was there that 
critical thought dawned for the western world. In them began 
that bold and free spirit of investigation which became the mark of 
the Hellenic mind. 

They held the key between East and West. They had held it 
some centuries before Darius found them in possession of it, in- 
solently tempting and then suffering his anger. Long before that 
fateful fifth century when they were to serve as the medium to 
bring East and West to war, they had been the agents of another 
kind of intercourse. For, just behind, through the valley of the 
Meander and passing the mountain fastnesses of Phrygia and 
Lydia, lay that overland caravan route which stretched through 
Asia Minor by old Hittite towns to touch, at Carchemish, the 
bazaars of Assyria. Along it moved the Oriental- Western trade. 
By the southern coast they met Phoenician ships, bringing goods, 
and perhaps an alphabet. Along the islands to the west and up 
the coast to the Black Sea their own ships came and went, gather- 
ing in that .commerce which had brought wealth to Troy, and 
planting their colonies. They were kin with the masters of Attica, 
and held an even larger share than they of that still more ancient 
culture which flourished in Crete and along the JEgea.n before the 
days of Homer and the steel swords of the north. They were 
Greeks, sharing the common heritage. But it was from the bar- 
barians rather than from Hellas that the inspiration came which 
set going the new scientific spirit. A knowledge of the world 
outside brought out and fed the native thirst for more ; and as the 
diversities of civilization opened up before them, with possibilities 
of comparison, such as Egyptians or Babylonians never enjoyed, 
they grew more curious and more skeptical at the same time. 
They had acquired an external point of view from which to judge 
of their own traditions. The naive primitive faith began to suffer 
from a growing sophistication, and in this movement of intellectual 
clarification there were some who attacked the Homeric tradition 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 135 

in somewhat the same spirit as the philosophers of the eighteenth 
century attacked the traditional theologies of Christendom. 
Before 500 B.C., Xenophanes, the philosopher, denounced the myths 
of Homer and Hesiod, because such miraculous occurrences are 
impossible in the face of the regularity of the laws of nature. In 
such a setting was born ''history." ^ 

The exact origins are confused and uncertain. As we have seen 
already, the word "history" {laropi-q) as used by these Ionian 
Greeks would apply rather to the investigations which character- 
ized the whole intellectual movement than to that one branch to 
which it was ultimately limited. The "historian" was the truth- 
seeker. The word was already used in this sense in the Iliad, where 
quarrelling parties in disputes at law came shouting " Let us make 
Agamemnon, Atreus' son, our arbitrator, [our 'histor']."^ Ob- 
viously, by the word "histor " Homer had in mind the wise man who 
knows the tribal customs and can get at the rights of the case. 
Such skilled "truth-seekers" are to be found in all semi-barbarous 
peoples. The Roman qucBstor^he who inquires — carried the office 
over into the formal magistracy. But truth-seeking is not con- 
fined to law-courts. One might "inquire" of oracles as well.^ 
It is noteworthy that a word with such possibiUties, which in Israel 
might have headed for rehgion and in Rome for law,* was in Greece 
kept clear of even philosophy. In spite of the myths with which 
it had so long to deal, the inquiry was in the world of living men ; 
it is a secular task, and a human one. There is in it, apparently 
from the first, a sense of hard fact, which sooner or later was to get 
rid of illusions. How it steered clear of philosophy is more difficult 
to tell. It has been stated that "history" to the lonians of the 
sixth century was much what the Athenians of the fourth century 
termed philosophy.^ But the same matter-of-fact quality which 

1 Cf. D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East (1909) ; J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek 
Historians, p. lo. 

Since this paragraph was written (some years ago), a very similar treatment has 
appeared in F. S. Marvin's Limng Past (1913). 

2 Iliad, Bk. XXIII, 1. 486. Cf. Bk. XVIII, 1. 501 for simUar use. 

* Cf. Euripides, Ion, 1, 1547. A collection of them was kept for reference in the 
Acropolis at Athens. Cf. The History of Herodotus, Bk. V, Chap. XC. 

* Cf. the opening phrase of Justinian's Institutes, "Law is . . . the knowledge of 
things human and divine." 

* Cf. G. Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature, p. 123. 



136 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

swept it far away from the idea of divine inspiration, also kept 
it from being lost in abstraction. Philosophia — love of knowledge 
— might come to mean speculations about speculations; but 
historia continued at its humbler, but more fundamental task of 
inquiring for the data. There is already a hint of its scientific possi- 
bilities in the fact that when Aristotle included in his philosophy 
an account of the actual, living world, he gave to this part of his 
survey the title Natural History. To Aristotle, however, the 
term still in the main carried with it the connotation of " research." 
It is only in the work of the last of the great Greek historians, 
Polybius, that this meaning shifts definitely from inquiry to 
narrative. To Polybius, intent as he was upon the scientific 
aspect of his work, this gradual change in usage may have passed 
unnoticed ; but it is none the less significant of unscientific pos- 
sibilities. For if historia escaped religion and metaphysics it was 
captured by literature. 

None of these distinctions, however, was possible in the Ionia 
of the sixth century. The very breadth of the term prevented one 
thinking of "historia" as mere history. Even Herodotus, although 
the usage was narrowing in his time, could hardly have imagined 
himself the Father of History in the later sense of the word. His 
''inquiry" was geography as well ; it included descriptions of phys- 
ical features of countries along with the occupations and achieve- 
ments of their inhabitants. The whole miscellaneous survey was 
his "history." But the surprising thing is that those sections which 
to us are the historical sections par excellence, the narratives of 
happenings beyond the memory of his own time or outside the 
possibility of his own inquiry, are called by another name. There 
are several of these embedded in his vast mosaic, large enough to 
be "histories" by themselves, the story of Croesus and Lydia, of 
Egypt, of Scythia or of Thrace ; but these narratives of the things 
really past are termed not "histories" but "sayings" — logoi. 

This means that they are secondary sources, as it were, narra- 
tives of other men, which he cannot verify by his own inquiry 
or "history." It means more, however. For logos was already a 
technical term;^ it was what a man had to say, — his "story" 
in about the sense in which the word is used by journalists today — 
^ The Latin sermo (our sermon) has had a somewhat similar history. 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 137 

a deliverance in prose. Hence prose-writers in Ionia were termed 
logographoi, and it is under this heading that one fi^ds, in most 
histories of Greek literature, the founders of history.^ 

The prose in history came by way of city chroniclers {&poi), who 
were busied in the Ionian cities, as elsewhere, in carrying back the 
story to Homer's heroes and Hesiod's gods.^ Possibly because 
they took material from temple and civic records,^ they broke away 
from verse and put their '* sayings" into prose. This in itself was 
a real liberation, but the results came slowly. The subject seems 
generally to have been the genealogical story of noble clans, — a 
subject to try the most scientific of tempers, especially if one's 
livelihood depends upon a successful artistic performance. Yet 
it was from among these men that the critical impulse came. 
Among them arose some who grew skeptical of the legends it was 
their business to relate and so became "truth-seekers" through a 
widened inquiry for the data of the past. 

At the head of the list of some thirty of these logographers 
whose names, but not whose works, have come down to us, a Greek 
tradition placed the "misty figure"^ of Cadmus of Miletus. 
Whether the fabled inventor of Greek letters was rather one of the 
real inventors of Greek prose, the city whose origins he is said to 
have described^ produced soon after the middle of the sixth cen- 
tury a prose writer who, both as narrator of the past of his own 
people and geographer of the world at large, may be regarded as 
the direct forerunner of Herodotus. Hecataeus of Miletus is the 
first "historian," whose works — even in fragments — have come 

^Herodotus refers to Hecataeus as "the maker of prose," \oyoiroi6s. Thu- 
cydides includes Herodotus among the \oyoypa<t>oi. The use of the term by modern 
writers to apply to these early historians dates from F. Creuzer's Die historiscke Kunst 
der Griechen . . . (1803, 2d ed., 1845). Oi^ the subject in general, seeW. v. Christ, 
Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (2 vols., sth and 6th ed., 1908-1913), (6th ed.), 
Vol. I, pp. 449 sqq.; A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la litterature grecque (5 vols., 2d 
ed., 1896-1899; 3d ed., Vols. I-HI, 1910-1914), (2d ed.), Vol. H, pp. 544 sqq.; 
G. Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature, p. 124; J. B. Bury, The Ancient 
Greek Historians, Lect. i. 

* Cf. M. Vogt, Die griechischen Lokalkistoriker, in Nette Jahrbiicher fUr classische 
Philologie, Sup. Vol. XXVII (1901), pp. 699-786. 

^ Such documents and inscriptions as were sure to be found in the important 
shrines and in the public offices. 

*J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 14-15. There is a good short 
summary here of the Cadmus problem. ^ The Foundations of Miletus. 



138 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

down to as, the first of whom we have any real knowledge of the 
line of those who criticised their sources and so devoted themselves 
to that "search for truth" which was to be the mark of the his- 
torian's profession.^ But it must be admitted that his claim to 
this distinction rests rather upon a single phrase — the opening 
words of his Genealogies — than upon the substance of the 
passages which have been preserved. His life was passed in that 
age when the great conflict between East and West began, and 
his home was the city which, perhaps more than any other, forced 
it on. The two eras, ther.^fore, which met in that rapid epoch, 
are reflected in his works. Two alone are attributed to him, an 
account of his Travels arounH the World, "^ and a book of local 
Genealogies, the one a description of the Persian world by a much- 
travelled subject of the great king, the other a story of his city's 
heroes by a patriot Greek. Of the two, the book of travels would 
seem — and did seem to the Greeks — to be the more important. 
It revealed the modern world to those who were to take over its 
heritage. But it is the other book which mainly concerns us here. 
There was in it the promise of something which makes it, in spite 
of its obscure and relatively trifling subject, one of the epoch- 
making contributions in the long story of our intellectual emanci- 
pation. It applied the new-won knowledge to criticise the ancient 
myths. Its opening words seem to mark the dawn of a new era : 
''Hecataeus of Miletus thus speaks: I write what I deem true; 
for the stories of the Greeks are manifold and seem to me ridiculous." 
Ringing words, that sound like a sentence from Voltaire. Un- 
fortunately, as has been indicated above, the few fragments in 
our possession hardly lead one to suppose that the actual achieve- 
ment of Hecataeus measures up to his ideals. We know that he 
did not, like Xenophanes, the philosopher, deny the myths in the 

* On Hecatasus see E. H. Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography among the 
Greeks and the Romans (2 vols., 2d ed., 1883), Vol. I; H. Berger, Geschichte der 
wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen (1903) ; W. v. Christ, Geschichte der 
griechischen Litter atur (6th ed.), Vol. I, pp. 451 sqq.; R. H. Klausen, Hecatcei 
Milesii Fragtnenta (1831) ; E. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (2 vols., 1892- 
1899), sections on Herodotus, passim; C. Miiller, Fragtnenta Historicorum Graecorum. 

^ Trjs irepioSoj in two books, one on Europe, and the other on Asia. On one 
aspect of this, with good bibliography, see B. Schulze, De Hecakei Milesii Frag- 
mentis qua ad Italiam Meridionalem S pedant (191 2). 



J 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 139 

Homeric legend on the basis of a priori scientific impossibility; 
his criticism was the product of a comparative study of mythology 
and history, rather than an application of Ionian philosophy. It 
was as a geographer that he brought the comparative method to 
correct the pseudo-historical. The open world he travelled was 
responsible for the open mind. 

Strangely enough, Herodotus records, in a notable passage, an 
incident in the life of Hecataeus which must have contributed 
largely to produce this first emphatic criticism of historical sources. 
It is not too long to quote : 

''When Hecataeus, the historian, was at Thebes, and, dis- 
coursing of his genealogy, traced his descent to a god in the person 
of his sixteenth ancestor, the priests of Jupiter did to him exactly 
as they afterwards did to me, though I made no boast of my family. 
They led me into the inner sanctuary, which is a spacious chamber, 
and showed me a multitude of colossal statues, in wood, which they 
counted up and found to amount to the exact number they had said ; 
the custom being for every high-priest during his lifetime to set up 
his statue in the temple. As they showed me the figures and reckoned 
them up, they assured me that each was the son of the one preceding 
him ; and this they repeated throughout the whole line, beginning 
with the representation of the priest last deceased, and continuing 
until they had completed the series. When Hecataeus, in giving 
his genealogy, mentioned a god as his sixteenth ancestor the priests 
opposed their genealogy to his, going through this list, and refusing 
to allow that any man was ever born of a god. Their colossal 
figures were each, they said, a Piromis, born of a Piromis, and the 
number of them was three hundred and forty-five ; through the 
whole series, Piromis followed Piromis, and the line did not run up 
either to a god or a hero. The word Piromis may be rendered 
'gentleman.' " ^ 

One must recall the situation. Egypt had been thrown open 
by Cambyses, and had now become the university of the Mediter- 
ranean world. How much it had to teach the inquisitive Greeks, 
as well as the Asiatics, we are only today discovering ; but the eager 
narrative of Herodotus shows how many such interviews as those 
at Thebes the priests of Egypt had been granting to the half- 

' The History of Herodotus, Bk. II, Chap. CXLIII. (Rawlinson's translation, 2d ed.) 



I40 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

barbarian Hellenes. Hecataeus had gone there believing in his 
own traditions, "boasting" of them, as Herodotus implies. The 
splendors of the river valley from Sais to Thebes — six hundred 
miles of a museum street — had hardly broken the crust of his 
Greek provincialism. He could at least offer a rival to Egyptian 
antiquity in the imaginative conceptions of the Olympian sages. 
Then came the impressive spectacle of centuries of a human past 
made visible and real and stretching out before his eyes; and it 
cast ridicule upon the slight and relatively insignificant Hellenic 
past. Evidently Hecataeus had described his own confusion or 
Herodotus would not have referred to it in this off-hand way. If 
so, the incident may well have stood out in his own mind as an 
experience of decisive importance in the moulding of his point of 
view. We might not be far wrong, then, if we were to date — so 
far as such things can be dated — the decisive awakening of that 
critical, scientific temper, which was to produce the new science 
of history, from the interview in the dark temple-chamber of 
the priests of Thebes. Yet we must not forget that it was the 
Greek visitor and not the learned Egyptian priests who applied 
the lesson. How much the skepticism of thinkers at home had 
already predisposed Hecataeus to critical attitude we cannot tell. 
But then we need not try to "explain" the mind of one of whom 
we know little more than what is given here ; especially since, 
even in that little, we see that Hecataeus had a mind of his 
own. 

Hecataeus is the only one of the logographers to whom Herodotus 
pays the tribute of naming as a source. Modern scholarship has 
interested itself in attempting to estimate how much the Father 
of History actually was indebted to his pioneering predecessor, but 
the problem belongs rather to the criticism of Herodotus than to 
that of Hecataeus and is too detailed for such a survey as this. The 
general conclusion is that Herodotus was even more in debt than 
he admitted, and that the earlier traveller not only supplied his 
successor with notes for his history but a guide for his actual travels 
as well. If this be so, it is all the more remarkable how Herodotus 
takes particular pains to discredit and ridicule Hecataeus. He 
repeatedly expresses his scorn of the geographers who adhere to 
the old Homeric cosmography and believe in the existence of an 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 141 

"Ocean stream" that bounds the world. ^ This attitude of critical 
superiority is not due to the possession by the critic of any superior 
technique in research, since he himself could make as grotesque 
concessions to myth, as, for example, in the accounts of the phoenix 
and hippopotamus, — the latter having, according to Herodotus,* 
cloven hoof, and horse's mane and tail. It was not in the descrip- 
tion of such detail that Herodotus could deny the merit of Hecataeus' 
achievement, so much as in the faulty generalizations which tra- 
dition had fastened upon Hecataeus — that Homeric map of the 
world which prevented one from ever forming a correct impression 
of geography as a whole. Hecataeus had been a great traveller and, 
we suppose, a shrewd observer, but he was unable to allow the body 
of fact he gathered to overthrow the preconceived ideas of the world. 
Herodotus, with much the same technique but greater mastery, 
could appreciate, as his predecessor failed to do, that where the 
body of facts runs contrary to theory, the theory must go, even if 
it have the weight of universal acceptance. Thus, from Hecataeus 
to Herodotus one passes a further step toward the science of history. 
Hecataeus after all was only a logographer, Herodotus a historian. 

It is impossible to go into detail upon the work of these lo- 
gographers. The writing of prose narrative is no improvement upon 
verse unless the author avails himself of its freedom to be more 
exacting in what he says, and, to judge from the scornful comment 
of Thucydides,^ the chroniclers were little better historians than 
the poets who preceded them. But Thucydides' impatience may 
not be altogether justified historically. However monastic and 
prosy these prose-writers became, they should hardly be blamed 
for their failure to evolve an adequate chronology, especially by 
the author of the Peloponnesian War, who is himself so careless of 
the calendar. And, however uncritical they remain, it was some- 

» Cf. The History of Herodotus, Bk. II, Chaps. XXI, XXIII ; Bk. IV, Chap. 
XXXVI, etc. 

* According to Porphyry (in Eusebius' Prmparatio Evangelica, Bk. X, Chap. Ill) 
the accounts in Herodotus, History, Bk. II, Chaps. LXXI, LXXIII, were taken liter- 
ally from Hecataeus. Cf. C. Miiller, Fragmenta Historicorum Grcecorum, Vol. I, p. 21, 
who attributes the last part of the phoenix story to Hecataeus. It is more charitable 
to discredit Porphyry as G. Rawlinson does {The History of Herodotus, 4 vols., 1858- 
1860; 2d ed., 1862; 3d ed., 1876; 2d ed., Vol. I, p. 40). The description of the 
hippopotamus was evidently imagined (by some one) from its name. 

. ^ Cf. Thucydides [History of the Peloponnesian War], Bk. I, Chap. XXI. 



142 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

thing to hand down the documents and stories of the past much as 
they found them.^ One must recall the whole situation, — the 
vague chronology, the involved calendar, the unreliable genealogies, 
the comparative absence of even bad material concerning the past, 
— in order to do justice to these blundering logographers. 

How Uttle advance was made, however, can be seen from the 
work of one of the greatest of the older contemporaries of Herodotus, 
Hellanicus of Lesbos. As a scholar he ranked high. He used ma- 
terials not simply from Greece, but from Asia as well, to straighten 
out chronology by a comparative survey. Then he consulted the 
lists of the archons of Athens and of the priestesses of Hera at 
Argos — the great shrine of Hera in Greece ^ — as basis for a 
chronicle of Attica from 683-2 to 404 B.C. But after all his labor, 
this pagan Eusebius retained a genuinely mediaeval mind. He 
reckoned, as did Herodotus and every one else, in terms of genera- 
tions ; but as these might have a 33-year unit, or a 23-year or 40- 
year unit, the result is most unsatisfactory. Moreover, Hellanicus 
twisted his figures as well, and in order to make out that the first 
mythical king of Athens, Ogygos, was as old as the founder of Argos, 
Phoroneus, he interpolated five kings in the Hsts of Athens ! ^ It 
is small wonder that when Thucydides came to sketch the period 
of history between the Persian war, where Herodotus left ofif, and 
the Peloponnesian war, where his own work began, he scornfully 
rejected the account of Hellanicus, although it was the only one 
in existence, and rewrote the narrative himself.^ 

Such works, which had now left poetry so far behind as to be not 

1 Dionysius of Halicarnassus says {De Thucydidis Historiis Judicium, Chap. V) 
that they did not add or subtract anything. But this hardly conveys the right im- 
pression. They were jejune but not necessarily copyists. 

^ Cf. C. Waldstein, The Argive Heraum (2 vols., 1902-1905), Vol. I, p. 4. 

' Cf. E. Meyer, Forschimgen zur alten Geschichte, Vol. I, pp. 176 sqq.; H. Kullmer, 
Die Historiai des Hellanikos von Lesbos, in Jahrhiicher fUr dassische Philologie, Sup. 
Vol. XXVII (1901)) PP- 455-698; J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 27-35. 

*C/. Thucydides {History of the Peloponnesian War], Bk. I, Chaps. LXXXIX to 
CXVIII, and especially the passage in Chapter XCVII : "I have gone out of my way 
to speak of this period because the writers who have preceded me treat either of 
Hellenic affairs previous to the Persian invasion or of that invasion itself; the in- 
tervening portion of history has been omitted by all of them, with the exception of 
Hellanicus; and he, where he has touched upon it in his Attic history, is very brief 
and inaccurate in his chronology." (Jowett's translation.) 



FROM HOMER TO HERODOTUS 143 

merely prose but prosy, were those upon which the Greeks of the 
great age of Athens rested their ideas of chronology. In the absence 
of adequate records, history was, even in Hellas, hardly rising above 
the level of mediaeval annals. It was reserved for a Herodotus of 
Halicarnassus to combine geography and history-narrative with 
criticism and literature, and so to win for history for all time a 
distinct place in the arts and sciences of mankind. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

On the subjects treated generally in this chapter the standard histories 
of Greek literature offer many suggestions which could not be elaborated in 
this short survey. To avoid repetition such references have been grouped at 
the end of the next chapter. On the Homeric question the student is referred 
to G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler's Hellenic Civilization (1915), in this series. 
In connection with this and the following chapters on Greek and Roman 
history, the student is reminded of the excellent guides to be found in the 
more recent and elaborate classical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The 
introductory manual on Greek antiquities by L. Whibley, A Companion to 
Greek Studies (3d ed., 1916), contams a short review of historical literature. 
The student of Latin antiquities will find a good starting point in J. E. Sandys, 
A Companion to Latin Studies (2d ed., 1913), with a fair comment on historians. 

For bibliographical apparatus the advanced student is referred to the 
Jahreshericht iiber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft where 
exhaustive surveys of pertinent recent literature, covering both Greek and 
Latin literatures, may be found. A few references to such bibliographies 
have been made in some of the following chapters, but there is no attempt 
to supply full lists of titles. That would more properly belong to the com- 
panion volume of texts, if it should ever be completed. 



CHAPTER XIII 

HERODOTUS 

The Kfe of Herodotus coincided almost exactly with the years 
of the Athenian supremacy, those sixty years or so which lay be- 
tween the battle of Salamis and the beginning of the end of things 
in the Peloponnesian war. He was born about 480 B.C., and died 
after 430 B.C. Practically nothing is known of his life except what 
can be deduced from his own history. His native city was Hali- 
carnassus, a Dorian settlement on the seacoast of Asia Minor, 
where, however, inscriptional remains indicate that the Ionic 
dialect was in use.^ He had thus accessible for his history the 
tongue which had already been consecrated to prose literature. 
But while he wrote their language, he could not rid himself of a 
strong native prejudice against the lonians. They are practically the 
only people in his whole narrative to whom he is almost consistently 
unfair. They ''have built their cities in a region where the air and 
climate are the most beautiful in the whole world ; for no other region 
is equally blessed with Ionia, neither above it nor below it, nor east 
nor west of it." ^ Yet, "of all its [Greek] tribes the Ionic was by far 
the feeblest and least esteemed, not possessing a single State of any 
mark excepting Athens. The Athenians and most of the other 
Ionic States over the world went so far in their dislike of the name 
as actually to lay it aside ; and even at the present day the greater 
number of them seem to me to be ashamed of it." ' Thus he brings 
his neighbors into the story, borrowing their tongue to do it ! And 
once in it, they fare no better. His jibes sometimes became a sneer, 
deftly driven home by the rhetorical device of having some one 
else — a Scythian for instance — say "by way of reproach" that 
the lonians "are the basest and most dastardly of all mankind . . . 

* This disposes of the diflSculty which critics had found in his use of it. 
» The History of Herodotus, Bk. I, Chap. CXLII. 
» Ibid., Bk. II, Chap. CXLIII. 

144 



HERODOTUS 



145 



but the faithfuUest of slaves." ^ There is a touch, a shadow, of 
something Dantesque in this strength of local antipathy, quite out 
of keeping with the breadth of sympathy and interest he shows 
elsewhere. The much- travelled Greek never entirely lost the narrow 
partisanship of his home town. To be sure, as commentators have 
pointed out, such anti-Ionian sentiments were popular at Athens,^ 
which was having its troubles keeping the lonians in subjection, 
in the days when Herodotus sought its hospitality ; but, although 
the applause of his audience ^ may have led him to polish his darts, 
he flicked them of his own accord. The Halicarnassus of his boy- 
hood seems to have left its traces in his outlook, whatever else it 
supplied."* 

It is unfortunate to have to touch first upon this evidence of 
smallness in Herodotus, for the work as a whole is marked by a 
breadth of view in keeping with its breadth of knowledge. Indeed 
it is doubtful if the wide scope of its information did not depend 
upon the open mind with which the author-voyager travelled the 
world, that frank desire to see things as they are, which, when 
disciplined, leads toward science. Just what disciplines directed 
the native curiosity of Herodotus no one knows, but they must 
have been considerable.^ His work reveals a wide and intimate 
knowledge of the poetry of Hellas, especially Homer ; ® and he had 
readily at hand his predecessors in the new art of prose-writing, 

1 Ibid., Bk. IV, Chap. CXLII. Cf. R. W. Macan's comments (Herodotus, the Fourth, 
Fifth, and Sixth Books (2 vols., 1895), Vol. I, Bk. IV, p. 98) that this remark "may 
have been current in Sparta : at least it has a Doric ring. But the sneer was 
singularly unjust, as the Ionic revolts proved. What is not found in Herodotus is 
the story of the surrender of the Asiatic Dorians to the Persian." 

* Cf. J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 61-62. 
' Cf. Thucydides' comment on him, infra, p. 163. 

* The best discussion of Herodotus' attitude toward Ionia is by R. W. Macan, 
Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books, Introduction, Vol. I, pp. Ixvii sq. 

' George Rawlinson, in the introduction to his translation of Herodotus, has 
perhaps the best survey of the subject as a whole. 

* "He has drunk at the Homeric cistern until his whole being is impregnated with 
the influence thence derived. In the scheme and plan of his work, in the arrangement 
and order of its parts, in the tone and character of the thoughts, in ten thousand little 
expressions and words, the Homeric student appears ; and it is manifest that the two 
great p>oems of ancient Greece are at least as familiar to him as Shakspeare to the 
modem educated Englishman." G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (2d ed.), 
Vol. I, p. 6. In addition, Rawlinson cites references to some fifteen poets. 



146 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

especially Hecataeus, to cite or refer to on occasion. His educa- 
tion, therefore, must have been almost as extensive as his travels, 
covering practically the known world. Only a well-born and well- 
to-do young man could equip himself as he did for his Hfe-task. 
Such a one could hardly keep out of politics in a Greek city, and 
his travels may have been partly due to exile. But of this he gives 
no glimpse himself, and the story of participation in a Halicar- 
nassan revolution, and subsequent withdrawal to Ionian Samos, 
rests only on a late source.^ Practically all we know for certain is 
that about 447 B.C., near the age of forty, he went to Athens to 
reside, and to form part of that most brilliant circle of men of genius 
which the world has ever seen, at the "court" of Pericles; that he 
left Athens four years later (443) to become a citizen of the Athenian 
colony of Thurii in Italy, where he died, apparently shortly after 
430 B.C. Into this framework were fitted many travels and the 
arduous labor of a great composition. Just how they fitted, careful 
study of the text can largely show, but such intensive criticism is 
no part of this survey. The striking thing is the extent of the 
travels, from upper Egypt in the south, to ''Scythia" in the far 
north, from Magna Graecia in the western Mediterranean to Babylon 
in the Orient, and almost all the world between ; the dates matter 
less. 

Turning from the biography of Herodotus to his history is like 
turning from a single article in an encyclopaedia to the encyclopaedia 
as a whole. The first thing that strikes one on opening it, is its 
vastness, its intricacy, the wealth of its information. Such a work 
is too large, in every sense of the word, to be compressed within 
the few pages of this outline. With it before us, we have at last 
entered upon the broad lines of the genuine history of History, and 
we may stand aside, as it were, to let the Herodotean achievement 
speak for itself. The usefulness of a guide depends not less upon 
maintaining discreet silences in the presence of monuments uni- 
versally known, than in bringing the traveller face to face with 
them. Such comments as follow, therefore, are not intended as 
contributions to scholarship, but as suggestions, mostly familiar 
to students, for reading the text itself in the light of this study as a 

^ Suidas, the Byzantine scholar of the early Middle Ages, whose lexicon preserved 
many valuable items of classical information. 



HERODOTUS 147 

whole, not leaving it either entirely unexplained nor yet permit- 
ting it to be entirely submerged beneath the rising tide of expert 
criticism. 

The first impression of the History is one of relative formless- 
ness; the rambUng story of a good raconteur. The opening sec- 
tions carry back the conflict between East and West to the dawn 
of history, or rather beyond it, to the rape of Helen by the Asiatics 
and of Europa and Medea by the Greeks, with all their conse- 
quences. The stage is thus set for the drama, and were Herodotus 
a dramatist, he would have at once brought on the main actors and 
reduced the outlying portions of his subject to mere incidents, as 
Thucydides did. But Herodotus was not a dramatist. Although, 
influenced perhaps by ^schylus, he depicted the overthrow of 
the Persians as the result of divine judgment, and so secured for 
his work an underlying dramatic unity, he handled his material 
like a romancer, with careless art passing from story to story and 
land to land. One subject seems to suggest another, and with 
hardly a casual ''that reminds me" the story-teller seems to plunge 
into each new narrative, rich with description of unknown lands 
and the fabulous tales of distant centuries. The mention of the 
attack of Croesus, King of Lydia, upon the Greek cities of Asia 
Minor leads to a general survey of the history of Lydia and of its 
Greek neighbors. The conquest of Croesus by Cyrus, which follows, 
opens up the great Persian Empire, and we pass to Egypt, Babylon 
and Scythia in a rambling survey of that great "barbarian" world. 
Then the narrative settles down to the struggle between Persians 
and Greeks. Passages deaHng with the Greeks in the earlier por- 
tion are now linked up with the revolt of the Ionian cities against 
Darius, and by way of the anger of the great king we are led to 
Marathon, and then to Salamis and more i^ecent times. As we 
approach this central theme, the digressions drop away, the style 
becomes more direct, and the author marshals his motley array of 
materials somewhat as Xerxes did his army when it passed before 
him in that vast, bewildering review. 

Such is the first impression one receives of the work as a whole, 
but closer reading shows that it is by no means so loosely knit as 
it appears. On the contrary, it bears evidence of careful editing, 
and fits with little strain into a general architectural plan, which 



148 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

modern scholars have had little difficulty in agreeing upon. Al- 
though the division of the work into nine books seems clearly to 
have been done by a later hand, probably, as indicated above/ 
to meet the exigencies of the libraries where scholars of the Hellen- 
istic period consulted it, yet the editor did his work so well that 
no one has attempted to improve upon it. But the assignment oi 
the text to these accepted "books" has not prevented modern 
scholars from attempting to find "broader, more fundamental 
and primary" divisions.^ The conclusions of the greatest textual 
critic of today, based on a most elaborate analysis and reduced to 
simple statement by the historian of Greek historians are as follows : ' 
"The work falls naturally into three sections, each consisting 
of three parts. The first section, or triad of Books, comprises the 
reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses, and the accession of Darius ; the 
second deals with the reign of Darius; the third with that of 
Xerxes. The first is mainly concerned with Asia including Egypt , 
the second with Europe ; the third with Hellas. The first displays 
the rise and the triumphs of the power of Persia ; the last relates 
the defeat of Persia by Greece ; while the middle triad represents 
a chequered picture, Persian failure in Scythia and at Marathon, 
Greek failure in Ionia. And each of the nine subdivisions has a 
leading theme which constitutes a minor unity. Cyrus is the theme 
of the first Book, Egypt of the second, Scythia of the fourth, the 
Ionian rebellion of the fifth, Marathon of the sixth. The seventh 
describes the invasion of Xerxes up to his success at Thermopylae ; 
the eighth relates to the reversal of fortune at Salamis ; the final 
triumphs of Greece at Plataea and Mycale occupy the ninth. In 
the third alone the unity is less marked; yet there is a central 
interest in the dynastic revolution which set Darius on the throne. 
Thus the unity of the whole composition sharply displays itself 
in three parts, of which each again is threefold.^ The simplicity 
with which this architectural symmetry has been managed, with- 

* Cf. supra, Chap. III. R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth BookSy 
Introduction, Vol. I, p. x. 

* R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books, Introduction, 
Vol. I, pp. xi sq. 

3 J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 38, 39, based upon Macan's analysis, 
though supplying independent criteria. 

* This has been developed by Macan. 



HERODOTUS 149 

out any apparent violence, constraint, or formality, was an achieve- 
ment of consummate craft." 

It may be wrong, but as one turns from this schematic arrange- 
ment to the narrative itself, an unbidden doubt arises to question 
if the "architectural unity" of the great work is quite as simple 
as the analysis seems to imply. As Macan himself confesses,^ the 
fourth book is like the first three in the quality which links them 
all, that encyclopaedic survey by way of vast digressions, which 
carries the narrative far away from the central theme. The fourth 
book swings off to the outer confines of the barbarian world, and 
matches with its brilliant sketches of Scythia and Libya the wonder- 
ful second book on Egypt. We leave Darius by Bosphorus or 
Danube to study the climate, fauna and flora of the cold northern 
plains, wander like the Greek traders (whose accounts are woven 
into the texture of the history) along far rivers through unknown 
peoples, trace the amber trail to dimmer distances, and, almost 
incidentally, note the habits and customs of men, until the Scythian 
logos becomes a priceless treasure of anthropological lore. This 
is surely in the style of the first three books. 

The change from the far-reaching discursive style to the nar- 
rower treatment of events in the later books is a gradual one; 
for there are digressions right up to the battle of Thermopylae, but 
as the Greeks themselves come more and more into the story there 
is naturally less description and more straight narrative. There 
was no need to describe the Greeks to themselves, except as the 
facts were not well known at Athens. The turning point in the 
history, therefore, inasmuch as one can detect it, seems to be when 
Athens itself is brought upon the scene, the Athens they all knew. 
This comes in the fifth book, when, through the great Athenian 
revolution, we are brought out of the "old regime" to the modern 
days of the new democracy. All before was ancient history ; the 
overthrow of the tyrants marked, fittingly, the coming of modern 
times, and from now on Herodotus could be a modern historian. 
It is hard at this distance to recover the perspectives of the fifth 
century B.C., and to realize that the Athens and Sparta which had 
figured in the earlier books were already, to the listeners of Herod- 

1 Cf. R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books, Introduction, 
Vol. I, pp. xxii-xxiv. 



ISO INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

otus, about as far away in time as the kingdom of Lydia in space. 
It takes but a short time for unhistorical peoples to lose their sense 
of the reality of events; and Solon and Croesus were both alike, 
the half -historical, half -mythical figures of a bygone era. With 
Miltiades and Darius the case was different. Though they too 
already were passing into the heroic past, men who had fought 
Darius were still alive, and these old veterans sprinkled in the 
audience would hardly encourage that discursive anecdotal type 
of narrative which was suitable for the ancient history and for the 
geography of the earher part. 

The fifth book, therefore, in which the "revolution" is described, 
mayLbe regarded as furnishing the transition from the "ancient" 
tQ_the "modern" history of Herodotus. The point is rather ob- 
scured by the persistence of downright mediaeval conditions at 
Sparta, which had yet to be described,^ and, although recent, seem 
to be on a par with the remoter days of the tyranny at Athens. 
But everything is shaping up for the dramatic act with which the 
book closes, the Ionian revolt, which brought the Great War to 
Greece, henceforth the one dominant theme of the history. The 
new keynote is struck by the comment with which Herodotus closes 
the account of the Athenian revolution : "And it is plain enough, 
not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that 
freedom is an excellent thing, since even the Athenians, who, while 
they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more 
vahant than any of their neighbours, no sooner shook off the yoke 
than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that, 
while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since 
then they worked for a master ; but so soon as they got their freedom, 
each man was eager to do the best he could for himself. So fared 
it now with the Athenians." ^ The path from this to Salamis was 
thus definitely entered upon, but it was still a long one with many 
turnings. 

Whichever way one views the "architectural plan" of Herod- 
otus' history, whether as a tri-partite grouping or a less formal 
but more intrinsic unity, the plan was apparently not thought 
out beforehand, but grew with the history itself. For internal 

^Cf. The History of Herodotus,Bk.V, Chaps. XXXiX-KLVm. , 

* Ibid., Bk. V, Chap. LXXVIH. 



HERODOTUS 151 

evidence shows that the first books to be written were the last 
three, and they were apparently already largely written by the 
time he went to Athens.^ His travels, — that is, the real expedi- 
tions to the outlying world, — came later. It was a triumph of 
art to master the bewildering miscellany which these later years 
revealed and weave it into a single texture, so that the original 
story of Xerxes' invasion, with which he came to Athens, was left 
after all as the fitting climax to the whole. 

If the simplicity and perfection of plan were a product of art 
and not, as might seem, the result produced by the very nature 
of the circumstances recorded, the same is true of the style. The 
very artlessness of Herodotus is artful. He is garrulous to a point 
and sophistically ingenuous. When unable either to confirm or 
deny the truth of what he tells, he brings his sources frankly into 
the narrative and leaves them there. Sometimes, often in fact, he 
seems to apologize for them, as in a passage in the seventh book, 
where he says, " My duty is to report all that is said ; but I am 
not obliged to believe it all alike — a remark which may be under- 
stood to apply to my whole History." ^ So he lets his characters talk ; 
and how they talk ! Often he seems to stand by and chuckle. Once 
in a while he interjects a dry remark, — as, when reporting a story 
that a certain Scyllias swam several miles under water, he adds, "My 
own opinion is that ... he made the passage ... in a boat" !^ 
Similarly, he often escapes committing himself, as on the question of 
the sources of the Nile, with regard to which he had found no one 
among aU those with whom he conversed who professed to have any 
knowledge except a single person. "He was the scribe who kept the 
register of the sacred treasures of Minerva in the City of Sais, and he 
did not seem to me to be in earnest when he said that he knew them 
perfectly well." ^ Herodotus wishes us to know that he could travel 
and listen with his tongue in his cheek; yet deftly, at the same 

^ For a full treatment of practically all detailed problems concerning Herodotus' 
history, see the edition by R. W. Macan, with its introductions, notes and appen- 
dices. On this point see Herodotus, the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Books {2 vols., 1908), 
Introduction, Vol. I, pp. xlv-xlvii. Cf. J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, p. 39. 

2 The History of Herodotus, Bk. VII, Chap. CLII. It should be noted that this 
comment dealt with a controversial matter of so recent date that it has a more de- 
fensive ring than the earlier ones. 

« Ibid., Bk. Vin, Chap. Vm. * Ibid., Bk. U, Chap. XXVIII. 



152 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

time, by his deference to our criticism, and the frankness of his 
confessions to us, he leaves an impression of simple candor that adds 
to ^he charm of the telling. 

|lt must not be forgotten how much of Herodotus' history is a 
collection of what other people said^j Even his moralizing is partly 
due to what he got from his informants.^ It is a vast mass of ma- 
terial, drawn from priests and travellers, from tradition and docu- 
ments, from stories of eye-witnesses and personal observation, all 
arranged and fitted to a single plan, but not worked over so as to 
obliterate the nature of the originals. This, to the modern student, 
is not its least merit. However biassed and pro-Athenian Herodotus 
was, however guides imposed upon his ignorance or sources misled 
him, he left us largely the means for passing judgment upon him- 
self. And this very fact does much to bring the verdict of even 
this critical, scientific age in his favor. 

It was serious work. Long years of travel were behind the 
story, and the author, with proud simplicity, proclaimed himself 
a savant in the opening line. His narrative "is the showing forth 
of researches [histories] " by one who is able to make them : the 
term history is here used in the definite technical sense. His 
predecessors were ''makers of prose," but he is a ** historian." 
Modern criticism denies him the distinction in just the way he 
claimed it,^ but it awards him still the distinction which he was 
awarded in antiquity, of being at once a pioneer and a classic, — 
the Father of History. He combined with the instincts of critical 
investigation the consummate skill of a great artist. When his 
work is compared with the histories written before his day, its 
epoch-making quality is at once apparent. There is not only the 
deft, elusive touch of a master in the massing of detail, but the 
narrative never loses its elan, however burdened with the weight 
of fact. It swings along with the strength and grace of a mind 

1 Cf. The History of Herodotus, Bk. II, Chap. XXVIII. 

2 The attack of A. H. Sayce in his Ancient Empires of the East, referred to above, 
casting doubt upon the veracity of Herodotus, was perhaps the severest criticism 
which the Father of History has had to face. Subsequent studies have refuted at 
least the implications of most of the points alleged. See the judgment of A. and M. 
Croiset, Histoire de la litterature grecque (2d ed.), Vol. II, pp. 565 sqq., where 
Herodotus is treated in connection with a most illuminating survey of Greek historiog- 
raphy. 



HERODOTUS 153 

unfettered by either the hampering taboos of the primitive or the 
theories and questionings of too philosophic culture. A tinge of 
romance from the golden age still lightens the sober path of real 
events. One must turn to the text itself to appreciate it; com- 
mentaries are as inadequate as they are plentiful. 

There are one or two further points, however, which are more 
especially pertinent to this survey. In the first place, we must 
revert to the point referred to above, — the modernity of Herodotus. 
Nothing is more difficult in the appreciation of history than its 
perspective, and in judging the achievement of the first historian 
we are almost sure to find, first of all, our own limitations. Through 
the long stretch of the intervening centuries, Midas, Solon, Croesus, 
Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes all seem to belong to one and the same 
time. They are all "ancients"; and the short intervals which 
lie between them do not seem of much importance. Only 
Egypt reaches out from what seems to us a common age into a 
different horizon,^ like the sombre suggestion of the mystery which 
lies beyond the beginning of the things one knows. But to Herodotus 
and his audience the perspective was entirely different. It would 
be as though some one of this generation, writing of the Franco- 
Prussian war, were to carry back the narrative of causes through 
the long centuries of the national development of Europe in order 
to treat adequately the questions of today. Herodotus had met 
and talked with those who lived through these stirring times ; 
the scars of war were in a sense stiU there ; the effects upon the for- 
tunes of Greece, and especially of Athens, were just showing them- 
selves to the full. He built his vast and labyrinthine structure 
around this main theme of the world-conflict ; and since it was a 
world-conflict, he brought to bear upon it the history of the world. 
The treatment varies with the sources. The events at home were 
known — or at least might be known — to his audience before- 
hand. There he must be on his guard. On the other hand, the 
accounts of Egyptians and Orientals are picked up at second- 
hand : Herodotus marks them off from the rest of his narrative ; 
they are the logoi, — the tales of the different countries, the extras 
in his narrative, "histories" by themselves. They are drawn from 
all kinds of sources, from native priests and dragomans and travel- 

* As for the legends of Babylon, they bear on the surface the marks of legend. 



154 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

lers before his day — Hecataeus especially. It is easy to see why 
this part is so much less reliable than the other. The priests of 
Egypt might mislead him or he misunderstand them ; but in the 
Grecian part he knew where he was going. As a matter of fact 
he did make the mistakes of a traveller. For a glaring instance, 
he puts down Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as a woman, — Queen 
Nitocris. But we must recall, as Macaulay reminds us, that 
Babylon was to Greece about what Pekin was to the Europe of 
the eighteenth century. The remarkable thing is that Herodotus 
got as much correct as he did. When one thinks of what tales 
European tourists are fed on today, what myths are current in 
this country about the character of foreign peoples, even what per- 
sistent misunderstanding there is between different sections of 
the same country, where intercourse is so general and so constant 
one begins to see the canny temper of the Father of History. 

It is hard to get a true sense of the Herodotean achievement in 
terms of any modern parallel. That of a European historian of 
today writing of the Franco-Prussian war is obviously entirely 
inadequate. Perhaps it might spur the historical imagination if 
we were to suppose that our Persians are Russians and our Greeks 
Japanese, and that some twenty or thirty years from now an 
Oriental historian sets to work to immortalize the war which broke 
the island barriers of Japan and started it on its imperial career of 
expansion. Port Arthur is Thermopylae, Mukden is Marathon, 
and Tsushima, Salamis. The Oriental Herodotus travels through 
the West to gather the materials for a history of the two worlds in 
conflict. So, in place of that ancient royal road of Persia, he takes 
the Trans-Siberian railway to the ancient West and wanders through 
Europe, in search of truth — a genuine la-ropeav. He asks the 
professors of Oxford for light on history and theology. He listens 
to talk in the clubs and hotels, and, with little to fall back upon 
but his Oriental common sense, and a few guide books in Japanese, 
tries to work out a reliable account of peoples whose language he 
cannot read or speak, and among whom he lived only as a travelling 
guest. His history of Europe might begin with an account of a 
Magellan, in search of golden fleeces in the eastern seas, or Marco 
Polo visiting the great EJian. Beyond Marco Polo, the first 
historical figure in the annals of Europe, would lie the incredible 



HERODOTUS 155 

stoty of Rome and Greece, and perhaps there would be a passage 
from Herodotus himself. Beyond this are the blank prehistoric 
ages, stretching back, according to Oxford anthropologists, to a 
fabulous ice flood, much farther than the 432,000 years which the 
priests allotted to ancient Babylon. Suppose that here and there 
he confused these data of science with the accounts of theologians 
who beheved in the literal inspiration of Genesis. He might, per- 
haps, suspect and suggest that the material hardly fitted the con- 
text, but the theologians were admirable men, with a high sense of 
morals, so down it would go, with a short note on the character of 
the informants. As the story drifted on toward modern times, it 
would grow more complicated, for in a single lifetime Japan passed 
from feudal society, fighting in armor, to a nation armed with siege 
cannon and dreadnoughts. Of the age of transition, when the 
Phoenician Britishers played their role, our Herodotus could gather 
personal reminiscences and local memoirs, — of varying reliabihty. 
But when he finally reaches the struggle in Manchuria, he has been 
over the ground of Mukden himself, and recalls, from his youth, 
the effects of the war. Here he knows his time and people, for 
they are his own. 

The comparison might be developed farther. But if we have 
to invent our modern Herodotus in order to appreciate the ancient 
one, it is better to delay until our impressions of the original are 
refreshed by a new study of the first single masterpiece in the his- 
tory of History. To do so one must turn to the book itself, for no 
series of extracts can do it justice. One instance of his scientific 
method is perhaps worth quoting in full for another reason. 

In an earlier chapter we ventured the regret that Herodotus had 
not visited Jerusalem about the time the Pentateuch was being 
edited for the Bible as we have it.^ It may be of interest to see how 
near he was to Jerusalem. He had become attracted by the problem 
of tracing the myth of Heracles throughout non-Greek parallels 
and tells us how, with curiosity quickened rather than subdued by 
what he found in Egj^t,^ he pursued his investigations to that 
borderland of Palestine, Phoenicia. A visit inland to the Jewish 
scholars would not have thrown much light on Heracles, for of the 

* Chap. VIII supra, ad fin. 

« Cf. The Historv of Herodotus, Bk. II, Chaps. XLIU-XLV. 



156 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Heraclean labors of Gilgamesh, the story of Noah retains no trace.^ 
But there might have been significant comments on other matters ! 
The researches in Phoenicia are recorded as follows : 

" In the wish to get the best information that I could on these matters, I 
made a voyage to Tyre in Phoenicia, hearing there was a temple of Hercules 
at that place, very highly venerated. I visited the temple, and found it richly 
adorned with a number of offerings, among which were two pillars, one of pure 
gold, the other of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night. In a con- 
versation which I held with the priests, I inquired how long their temple had 
been built, and found by their answer that they too differed from the Greeks. 
They said that the temple was built at the same time that the city was founded, 
and that the foundation of the city took place two thousand three hundred 
years ago. In Tyre I remarked another temple where the same god was wor- 
shipped as the Thasian Hercules. So I went on to Thasos, where I found a 
temple of Hercules which had been buUt by the Phoenicians who colonized 
that island when they sailed in search of Europa. Even this was five genera- 
tions earlier than the time when Hercules, son of Amphitryon, was born in 
Greece. These researches show plainly that there is an ancient god Hercules ; 
and my own opinion is, that those Greeks act most wisely who build and 
maintain two temples of Hercules, in the one of which the Hercules worshipped 
is known by the name of Olympian, and has sacrifice offered to him as an im- 
mortal, while in the other the honours paid are such as are due to a hero." ^ 

There is no need to appraise the work of Herodotus; history 
has already done that for us. Until the monuments were deciphered 
his account was about all we had of some of the greatest empires of 
the ancient world, and it still remains a constant commentary on 
them. One might even say that until our own time it has been 
for antique history as a whole almost what Homer was to the Greek 
of Athens. But if appraisal of his achievement is gratuitous, it 
may be well in closing to recall that the achievement involved the 
two aspects of historiography, — criticism, which lies in the field 
of science, and narrative, which is mainly art, and that while the 
latter quality has been chiefly of value in the long centuries of the 
unscientific mind, preserving the story by the very magic of its 
appeal, yet today it is the other aspect which is of most importance ; 
for it has now to pass a much more critical audience than ever 
assembled in Athens, and one that knows more of Greece than they, 
or of its antiquity than Herodotus. 

» Vide supra, Chap. V. 2 The History of Herodotus, Bk. II, Chap. XLIV. 

(Rawlinson's translation.) 



HERODOTUS 157 

It follows, that only those conversant with this vast new lore 
of classical and Oriental archaeology are qualified to speak authori- 
tatively on the critical capacity and the reliability of Herodotus. 
But, while leaving detailed criticism for textual students, we may 
at least register the fact that their verdict is growingly in his favor. 
For the case of the writings of Herodotus is somewhat parallel with 
that of the records of the Jews. So long as they were taken for 
more than they could possibly be, they were open to most serious 
charges of anachronisms, exaggerations and the like. But when a 
truer historical perspective enables us to appreciate the necessary 
limitations, in both the implements and the sources of research, 
of all antique historians, we obtain a juster estimate of their per- 
formance because we do not expect too much. So it was with 
Herodotus. When the data of history from the inscriptions 
began to run counter to some of his accounts there was a 
movement of distrust in them,^ but it has apparently subsided, 
and we have more discriminating judgments, based on less 
expectations. 

It was obviously impossible for Herodotus to write history as 
we do now. The question is whether he used his methods success- 
fully. There was one stern critic of his time, Thucydides, who 
clearly thought that he attempted too much. Thucydides would 
likely have held the story down to the original last three books, and 
polished them over and over (as indeed Herodotus did), established 
every item in them indisputably, and left it at that. But Herodotus 
chose to add to them the logoi or histories which fill the long proem, 
although he could not establish their accuracy with the precision 
which characterized the events of his own time. The contrast 
is significant, and has been taken to show a distinctly less scientific 
temper on the part of Herodotus, in that he has not that keen 
appreciation of the boundary line which separates the world of 
fact from that of fiction. But is the line as firm a one after all as 
the purely scientific mind imagines it ? If Herodotus had been as 
skeptical as Thucydides, he would have left out of his history some of 
its most valuable parts, for some of the things most incredible to him 

' Perhaps the strongest statement of this is in A. H. Sayce's Ancient Empires of 
the East. See, by contrast, the judgment summed up in Bury's Ancient Greek His- 
torians. 



158 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

contain hints of items established or made intelligible by archaeology.* 
The most striking instance is the comment of Herodotus on the 
story of the Phoenicians circumnavigating Africa at the behest 
of Neco, the Egyptian Pharaoh. "On their return, they declared 
— I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may — 
that in sailing round Libya they had the sun on their right-hand." ^ 
Again, in his description of Scythia, he doubts the long northern 
nights, perhaps because of the exaggerated way the account reached 
him, that men there slept half the year ;^ he refuses to indorse the 
existence of any ''Tin Islands" whence the tin came which they 
used,^ and expressly states that, with reference to the Baltic, 
"though I have taken vast pains I have never been able to get an 
assurance from an eye-witness that there is any sea on the further 
side of Europe." ^ It would have given a poorer, and not a more 
accurate idea of the world as known to the contemporaries of 
Herodotus, if aU this varied information had been sorted out by a 
too-skeptical mind. The reader who is not upon his guard is con- 
stantly reminded,^ by innuendo, if not openly, that a fact was not 
finally established simply because it was recorded, — a reminder too 
long ignored, — and that the reader should contribute as well some 
of the critical insight he demanded of the writer. The sources 
Herodotus used have been analyzed in great detail,^ and the result 
is to show that the work is much more the product of scholarly 
erudition and less of casual hearsay than at first appears. He used 
documents, such as the acts of the ecclesia at Athens, treaties, 

* Cf. G. Rawlinson's acute observations along this line, The History of Herodotus 
(2d ed.), Vol. I, pp. 71 sq., and R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth 
Books, Introduction, Vol. I, p. Ixxiii. 

* The History of Herodotus, Bk. IV, Chap. XLII. 

» Cf. ibid., Bk. IV, Chap. XXV. ■• Cf. ibid., Bk. Ill, Chap. CXV. " Ibid. 

« Cf. ibid., Bk. II, Chaps. XXVIII, LVI-LVII, CXXXI; Bk. Ill, Chaps. CXV, 
CXVI; Bk. IV, Chaps. XXV, XXXI, XXXH, XXXVI, XLH, XCVI, CV; Bk. V, 
Chap. X ; Bk. VII, Chap. CLH. 

^ See especially the conclusions of R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth 
and Sixth Books, Introduction, Vol. I, pp. Ixxiv sqq. One of the most interesting prob- 
lems in his use of sources is in his account of Darius' expedition into Scythia, where 
he omits all mention of the Balkans (Bk. IV, Chaps. XC-XCIII) apparently, as Macan 
surmises, because at this point he was following a historical and not a geographical 
source, and it made no mention of the mountains. But this incident only emphasizes 
all the more the success with which, upon the whole, Herodotus welded his materials 
and marshalled the facts. 



HERODOTUS 159 

declarations of war, but more sparingly than a modern historian 
would, and seems to have been willing to take them second-hand. 
He could embody genealogies,^ and use geographies while abusing 
them.^ But there was one set of sources which, however essential, 
was of dubious value : the oracles, especially those of Delphi. 
They largely furnished the mechanism for that supernatural element 
which to us lends an air of myth to the narrative, but they were 
part and parcel of Greek history and Herodotus had no choice but 
to use them. Unfortunately they helped him to ignore his own 
chief defect, — an absence of the sense of historical causation. He 
sought only to keep the motives psychologically true ^ and left 
events to shape themselves under the hand of fate, or by the chasten- 
ing justice of the gods. For while Herodotus did not, like the poets 
and his predecessors, follow the gods to Olympus, and "drew ... a 
very marked line between the mythological age and the historical," ^ 
he remained throughout a devoutly religious man. "Under the 
sunny gleam of his rippling narrative, there is a substratum of deep 
melancholy and of the awe concerned with the anger and envy 
of the gods. King Croesus, whom the auriferous Pactolus made 
the richest of men, Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, or Periander, 
despot of opulent Corinth — their pride and their end are merely 
iterations and reverberations of the stern melody of human success 
and divine retribution and the humiUation of men, exemplified 
most signally in Xerxes himself." ^ This belief in a Providential 
scheme of things offered him a clue for tracing the sequence of 
events which is open now to criticism. But history had to wait 
from the days of Herodotus to our own for anything approaching 
a mastery of causation in history. And perhaps our groping 
may, before long, be classed with such tendency-writing as his. 

As to style, the varied charm and genial manner are still as 
fresh and winning as ever ; yet one device which Herodotus took 
over from his logographic predecessors, — but which, as we shall 
see, goes back to the very origins of story-telling, — the insertion of 

1 Cf. The History of Herodotus, Bk. VI, Chap. LIII. 
' Vide supra, Hecataus. 

' The point is well developed by R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth and 
Sixth Books, Introduction, Vol. I, p. cvi. 

* G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (2d ed.), Vol. I, p. 94. 
' G. W. Botsford in Hellenic Civilization, p. 23. 



i6o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

speeches into the narrative, leaves upon the whole the tone of some- 
thing antique. What gave an added air of reality to it in ancient 
Greece lessens its force today. But of this device we shall have 
more to say when we come to it in a less natural setting and form 
in the work of Thucydides. 

With Herodotus a new art may be said to have begun, that of 
basing a genuine epos upon the search for truth. How potent the 
touch of the master in it was may be judged from the fact that it 
still remains among the first of all the creations of history, and 
that it embodied for subsequent centuries the life and movement, 
thought and action of all that vast antiquity which lay outside the 
Bible and the other Greek literature. Even Darius and Xerxes 
owed a large part of their immortaUty to the traveller-student of 
Halicarnassus. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The best edition of the text of Herodotus is that of H. Stein (2 vols., 1869- 
1871, and 5 vols., 4th, 5th and 6th ed., with notes, 1893-1908). The last six 
books of this have been reprinted by R. W. Macan, along with introductions, 
valuable commentaries, maps, etc., thus forming the best edition for general 
use {Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Books, 2 vols., 1895 ; Herodotus, 
the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Books, 2 vols., 1908). There are two principal 
English translations. The History of Herodotus, one by G. Rawlinson (4 vols., 
1858-1860; 2d ed., 1862 ; 3d ed., 1876), with a wealth of notes, though anti- 
quated as regards archaeological finds, particularly for the East ; and one by 
G. C. Macaulay (2 vols., 1890, new ed., 1904). The Rawlinson translation 
has been used in the text. A translation of Herodotus, by A. D. Godley, is 
announced for the year 1920 by the Loeb Classical Library. For general 
accounts of Herodotus and his work, see the histories of Greek literature : G. 
Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1912), Chap. VI, pp. 132-152; 
A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la litterature grecque (5 vols., 2d ed., 1896-1899; 
3d ed., Vols. I-III, 1910-1914) (2d ed.), Vol. II, Chap. X, pp. 565-637; W. 
V. Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (2 vols., 5th and 6th ed., 1908- 
1913), Vol. I, pp. 459-476; and also J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians 
(1909), Lect. II, pp. 36-74. For detailed and careful study a notable work 
is that of A. Hauvette, Herodote, historien des guerres mediques (1894). See 
also E. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (2 vols., 1892-1899), Vol. I 
pp. 151-202 (Herodots Chronologie der griechischen Sagengeschichte and four 
supplements). Vol. II, pp. 196-268 {Herodots Geschichtswerk) ; V. Costanzi 
{Richer che su alcuni punti controversi interna alia vita e all' opera di Erodoto), 
Memorial del' r. Instituto Lombardo, i8gi, pp. 181-240 ; G. Busolt, Griechische 
Geschichte (3 vols., 2d ed., 1893-1904), Vol. II, pp. 602 sqq.; for more special 



HERODOTUS i6i 

points see J. L. Myres (Herodotus and Anthropology), in R. R. Marett, An- 
thropology and the Classics (1908) ; E. Weber, Herodot als Dichter, in Neue 
Jahrbiicher fiir das klassische Altertum, Vol. XXI (1908), pp. 669-683; W. 
Nestle, Herodots Verhdltnis zur Philosophic und Sophistik, Prog. Schonthal 
(1908) ; H. Matzat, Uber die Glaubwiirdigkeit der geographischen Angaben 
Herodots iiber Asien, in Hermes, Vol. VI (1872), pp. 392-486; R. Miiller, Die 
geographische Tafel nach den Angaben Herodots (1881) ; A. Bauer, Die Entste- 
hung des Herodotischen Geschichtswerkes (1878), Herodots Biographic; eine 
Untersuchung (1878) ; K. W. Nitzsch, Uber Herodots QucllenfUr die Geschichte 
der Perserkriege, in Rheinisches Museum, Vol. XXVII (1872), pp. 226-268; 
H. Diels, Herodot und Hekataios, in Hermes, Vol. XXII (1887), pp. 411-444. 
The criticism of A. H. Sayce, in his Ancient Empires of the East (1883, reprinted 
1900), has met with little sympathy among scholars. For the question, see 
in addition to A. Hauvette, cited above, Part I ; A. Croiset, Revue des itudes 
grecques. Vol. I (1888), pp. 154 sqq.; R. W. Rogers, History of Babylonia and 
Assyria (2 vols., 6th ed., 1915), Vol. I, p. 397 ; J. Oppert, in Melanges Henri 
Weil (1898), pp. 321 sqq. For Herodotus' influence on later philosophers see 
J. Geffcken, Zwei griechische Apologeten (1907), p. 188, n. 3. For his influence 
on Roman historians, see W. Soltau, Die Anfdnge der romischen Geschicht- 
schreibung (1909), Chap. IV, pp. 73-91, and Appendix III {Herodot bei romi- 
schen Historikern) . For other recent material on Herodotus, see Jahresbericht 
Uber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft; Vol. CXVII (1903), 
pp. 76 sqq., for 1898-1901 ; Sup. Vol. CXLVI (1909), pp. 556 sqq.; Vol. 
CXLVII (1910), pp. I sqq., for 1902-1908; Vol. CLXX (1915), pp. 291 sqq., 
for 1909-1915 ; Vol. CLXXI (191 5), pp. ig^ sqq. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THUCYDIDES 

Alongside the history of Herodotus stands a work which begins 
as follows : 

"Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war in 
which the Peloponnesians and the Athenians fought against one 
another. He began to write when they first took up arms, believ- 
ing that it would be great and memorable above any previous 
war." 

In such sober terms does the greatest historian of antiquity 
begin the story of those eventful years which determined the 
fate of Athens, and with it, of the civilized world. This sober- 
ness is typical of the whole work; a consciousness of the 
high theme even more. For the author was a difTerent type of 
man from the sophisticated but garrulous Herodotus. He, too, 
had travelled before his work was done, being also an exile. 
But he did not become a citizen of the world, catching with easy 
famiharity the changeful notes of different countries. He remained 
throughout a high-born Athenian, a magistrate in history, severe 
and impartial even when his dearest interests were at stake, proud, 
isolated, self-contained.^ There could not well be a greater con- 

^ Thucydides (c. 460 ( ?)-c. 396) was sprung from an old Thracian family on his 
mother's side, though his father was an Athenian citizen. We have no trustworthy 
evidence for the date of his birth, some placing it as early as 471, others as late as 455 ; 
a late date is generally accepted, however. His family was well-oflF, possessing valuable 
mining properties in Thrace. His early life was spent at Athens, where the influence 
of the sophists upon him was great. Although he tells us that as soon as the Pelopon- 
nesian war opened, in 431, he kept a record of it from the very first, he took no great 
part in it himself until 424, when he was elected one of the two generals to command 
an expedition into Thrace. He was unsuccessful, however, owing to his failure to 
arrive in time ; and the incident resulted in his exile. For twenty years he lived on his 
Thracian estates, and returned to Athens only after its defeat in 404. His stay in the 
fallen city was but for a short time, as he soon returned to Thrace, and spent the re- 
mainder of his life in working upon his history. We canpot be sure of the date of his 
death, but it seems probable that it took place between 399 and 396 b.c. Tradition 
says that he was murdered ; in any case his History was not finished at the time of 

162 



THUCYDIDES 163 

trast than that between Herodotus and Thucydides. Thucydides 
himself knew this. He has a poor opinion of Herodotus, and as 
much as says so — though without deigning to mention him. 
There is no mistaking a remark like this, however: "Men do not 
discriminate, and are too ready to receive ancient traditions about 
their own as well as about other countries." ^ He classes with the 
poets those "tales of chroniclers who seek to please the ear rather 
than to speak the truth." ^ His own ideal is different — it is 
accuracy and relevancy — a straight story and a true one. And he 
reached his ideal. 

> Thucydides, too, was a modern historian, more so than He- 
rodotus. He wrote the history of his own time. As we have just 
seen, he states that he began collecting material for it when the 
Peloponnesian war began ; so that it has not even the genial 
fallacies of memoirs written late in life and blurred over by failing 
memory or sources. He enjoyed unrivalled opportunities. High 
in affairs of state, he was famiUar with the inner history of politics 
and knew personally the leading men. Even his exile enabled him 
to become acquainted with the Spartans^ and probably to visit Sicily, 
where the naval power of Athens met its fate.^ And he brought 
to his task a brain that matched the best that Greece produced — 
which is the highest tribute that can be paid. 

His genius shows itself at the very start. In a few bold pages he 
cuts his way through the mass of tangled myths and legends about 
the early history of Hellas, and presents a clear and rational outline. 
Then, pausing a moment to criticise his predecessors, the poets and 
logographers — who had never quite done this thing before — with 
a proud note on his own enterprise, he plunges into the theme of 
his history. 

Here we have not the time to follow him, and even if we had, 
we may as well confess, with Thucydidean candor, that few of us 
would care to do so. For all the art of the greatest historian of 
antiquity cannot quite reconcile the modem reader — unless he 

his death, and one legend has it that the eighth book was completed by his daughter, 
who then gave the whole work to Xenophon to be published. 

» Thucydides [History of the Pdoponnesian War], Bk. I, Chap. XX. (Jowett's 
translation.) 

^/ftttf., Bk. I, Chap. XXI. 

3 Cf. ibid., Bk. V, Chap. XXVI. * Cf. J. B. Bury, op. cit., p. 76. 



i64 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

is a Hellenist beforehand — to a prolonged study of the details 
of the Peloponnesian war. For Thucydides it was the greatest 
event in history. The Trojan war had found a Homer ; the Persian 
a Herodotus ; but these two great epochs of the Hellenic past were, 
in his eyes, of far less importance than that of the great civil war 
which involved all of Greece and even disturbed the otherwise 
negligible barbarian world. The more he studied the past and 
compared it with the present, the more he was convinced that the 
greatest theme in history was offered to him by the war of his own 
lifetime. So he preserved its detailed story with scrupulous care, 
and it is its very excellence as history against which the modern 
reader rebels. For the war was long and had many turnings ; and 
Thucydides is no garrulous guide or entertainer. He marches 
sternly ahead through a world of facts ; it is too serious business 
for one to turn aside and view the scenery ; even when the campaign 
is over for the year and we return home to the city, we must attend 
the council where plans for next year are on foot. There is only 
one purpose in Hfe and that is to see the war through. The result 
is that we are led through years of desultory fighting, raids, skir- 
mishes, expeditions by land and sea, debates in council, strategy in 
battle, until our memories are fairly benumbed by the variety 
of incident and the changes in policies, leadership and fortune. 

It is possible, however, that our weariness is caused less by what 
is told than by what is left unsaid. Nothing so tires a traveller 
as to miss the aim of his journey. We can stand long miles of 
dusty tramping if we are reassured from time to time by glimpses 
of the delectable mountains. The same is true of mental journeys ; 
fatigue is largely a matter of frustration. And so with Thucydides. 
The tale he tells is not what we wish most to hear. Its theme is 
not the greatest in history. Merely as a military event the war 
was relatively insignificant. Compared with the wars of Rome, of 
Hun and Teuton, of mediaeval crusaders and modern nations, 
the struggle between two leagues of city-states has little in itself — 
merely as war — to attract attention. What makes the Peloponne- 
sian war of lasting interest is not the actual fighting but the issues 
at stake — Greek civilization and Athenian greatness. Our minds 
wander from the story of slaughter to what remains untold, the 
achievements in the art of peace, which alone made the war signifi- 



THUCYDIDES 165 

cant, — even for Thucydides.^ So, if the narrative compels us to 
follow, — and no one can dispute its power, — there are seasons 
when we shoulder the yearly cuirass with reluctance. 

As a matter of fact the greatest theme in history lay right before 
his eyes, but it was not war; it was the Athens of Pericles' and 
of his own time. Instead of describing that, a work for which 
his discriminating temper would have eminently fitted him, he 
chose rather to hand down as part of "an everlasting possession" ^ 
to future ages, instructions for our Von Moltkes, Kuropatkins, 
Joffres and Ludendorff s, in the handling of spear-men on foraging 
campaigns ! There is no glimpse of the Parthenon except as it 
looms up against the sky where the refugees from Attica watch 
the flames of Spartan pillagers in their homes, no allusion to the 
drama of Athens in spite of the fact that it furnished at least the 
suggestions of the mould in which his manual of warfare was re- 
cast into the tragedy of Hellas. There is a proud consciousness all 
the time that the Acropolis is there and that the art and literature 
of Athens are a shining model to the world, but all references to 
them are severely suppressed as not being germane to the subject. 
Only once does Athens really come into the history, the Athens 
to which subsequent ages looked back with such wonder and de- 
spair, — and that is in the funeral oration of Pericles. This is 
enough, however, to show what we have lost in the refusal of 
Thucydides to write the history of a people instead of that of a war. 
No city ever received a prouder tribute, or one more eloquent. It 
does not describe the monuments, it adds another to them ; for 
it stands like a solitary block of prose, set in the midst of the tragedy 
of war, — a Parthenon itself, hewn to enshrine not the myth- 
goddess of the city but the human spirit of its citizens. 

An orthodoxy of appreciation surrounds the works of the old 
masters in any art ; the heretics "fail to understand." But heresy 
has a moral if not an artistic justification, and we must register 
the disappointment of the reader of Thucydides who comes to him 
in the hope that he will find in his pages a living picture of the 

* Cf. Thucydides [History of the Pehponnesian War], Bk. I, Chap. XI. "Poverty 
was the real reason why the achievements of former ages were insignificant" [and the 
Peloponnesian war so much more important than the Trojan, etc.]. 

» Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XXII. 



i66 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

cities which waged the war. To be sure, he did not write for us ; 
he wrote for Athenians, or at least for Greeks, and they took for 
granted what we wish most to know. But the fact remains that 
the work lacks for us its central theme. Much has been made 
recently of the influence of the tragedy of iEschylus upon the form 
into which Thucydides threw the materials of his history.^ It is 
claimed that this was as much a model to him — consciously or 
unconsciously — as the epic was to Herodotus. But for the 
modern audience the rules of the tragedy seem strangely violated. 
We are continually behind the wings where the killing is in progress. 
The principals, too, seem to move across the stage at times from 
insufficient motives, a single speech of rather obvious remarks 
determining the policy of a city. The real reasons for much of the 
intricacies of the drama remain undiscovered. We miss a good 
chorus, made up, if possible, of the business men from the Peiraeus, 
who might explain, if Thucydides did not disdain their foreign 
accent, the real causes of the war and of the policies of Athens — 
in terms of economics. 

We should not be tempted to elaborate the shortcomings of 
Thucydides from the standpoint of the modern reader, if it were 
not for the fact that writers on Greek literature, and even historians 
who should know better, in their enthusiasm over the magisterial 
perfonnance, where the scientific spirit dominates as nowhere else 
in antique history, give the impression to the student that if he 
does not find the History of the Peloponnesian War completely 
satisfying his heart's desire, the fault is all his own. There is no 
fault; there are merely intervening centuries. A work of genius 
may be universal and for all time ; but the form in which it is em- 
bodied bears the marks of the local and temporary. This is always 
true, more or less. In art, as in nature, immortality is of the spirit. 
That spirit, in Thucydides, was poised in Hellenic balance, between 
science and art, a model for all time ; but the work which it pro- 
duced shows the limitations of outlook and material which definitely 
stamp it as antique. To see in the author of the Peloponnesian 
War a "modern of moderns," ^ facing history as we do, equipped 
with the understanding of the forces of history such as the historian 

* Cf. F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907). 

* Cf. Th. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (4 vols., tr. 1901-1912), Vol. I, p. 503. 



THUCYDIDES 167 

of today possesses, is to indulge in an anachronism almost as naive 
as the failure to appreciate Thucydides because he lacks it ! There 
is a world of difference between the outlook of a citizen of Periclean 
Athens, — however keen and just his judgment, however free 
from superstition and creduUty, — and that of a modern thinker 
suppHed with the apparatus for scientiJ&c investigation. The whole 
history of Europe lies this side of Thucydides, and it would be 
strange indeed if the historian of today had learned nothing from 
its experience, especially from the nineteenth and twentieth cen- 
turies, which have contributed at the same time the implements 
of historical research and the widened outlook of the social sciences. 
Yet such is the spell which the spirit of Thucydides still exerts 
that even Eduard Meyer, the historian who has perhaps done most 
to reconstruct antique history in the light of those forces which the 
Greek ignored, is led to assert that there is only one way to 
handle the problem of history, that which Thucydides first used 
and in which no one has ever surpassed him.^ 

Were Thucydides alive today, we venture to think that he would 
be the first to dissent from this judgment, or at least from the general 
implications involved as to the character of his work. The his- 
torian who passed such impatient strictures upon Herodotus would 
certainly not rest content now with his own performance. There are 
at least four major elements in his history which he would now 
recast. In the first place he would have to admit his inability to 
grapple with the past. He lacked both the implements for deahng 
with it and a sense of its bearings upon the present. In the second 
place he failed to give an adequate picture of Greek politics, keeping 
too close to the definite politics of the war to catch its working as a 
whole ; and he missed altogether the economic forces which underlay 
so much of both war and politics. Finally, he put the political and 
diplomatic elements of his story into the form of speeches by the 
leading characters, — a device common to all antique historians, 
but which violates the primary laws of historical work today. 

Let us take up these points, hurriedly, in turn. We have said 
that Thucydides was not at home in deahng with the past ; yet his 
short introduction to the history of Greece before his day was a 

* C/. E, Meyer, Kleine Schriften (1910), (Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte), 
p. 67, 



y 



i68 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

unique performance. The paradox is not difficult to explain. His 
sketch of early Greek history is remarkable mainly for what it 
leaves out. It does not fall into the common fault of early historians, 
that of romancing. It does not exaggerate as poets and chroniclers 
did. A skeptical spirit and sound common sense kept Thucydides 
from yielding to that greatest of all temptations to the story- 
teller, making a point by stretching the tale. To the antique 
historian this was much more of a temptation than it can ever be 
again, for there was little chance that his audience would find him 
out. When the modern historian tells a great story he is at once 
asked for his sources, and before the book is fairly started on its 
career, a dozen other historians are on his track, busily verifying 
the account. In the days of Herodotus and Thucydides, the past 
was well-nigh unexplored, and the traveller who did not bring back 
from its dim horizons some trophy of what might have been, would 
miss the applause which he might otherwise so easily win. Thu- 
cydides cared nothing for such applause and proudly broke with those 
who did. He sought the truth because he wished it, not because 
his readers were clamoring for it ; yet his imagination caught the 
reward of future centuries, when, as he foresaw, his history would 
be as imperishable as the truth which it contained. 

But there is a world of difiference between denying the fabulous 
in the past and appreciating the importance of the obscure. Be- 
cause the past lacked greatness Thucydides thought it unworthy 
of his attention. He states his negative conclusions in no uncertain 
terms: "Judging from the evidence which I am able to trust 
after most careful enquiry, I should imagine that former ages were 
not great either in their wars or in anything else." ^ By "former 
ages" he includes everything down to his own day. Even Salamis 
had its touch of pettiness; the Greek ships were partly open- 
decked.^ Compared with the great age in which he Kved, all that 
had gone before seemed poor and insignificant, and therefore once 
having convinced himself that this was so, he ignored the past as 
much as possible. His judgment may have been justified by the 
achievements of the Athens of his time ; but the perspective is all 
the same a barren one so far as history is concerned, for his narrative 

* Thucydides [History of the Pehponnesian War], Bk. I, Chap. I. 
» Cf. ibid., Bk. I. Chap. XIV. 



THUCYDIDES 169 

was limited to the events of his own day. The modern historian 
has no such outlook. Although he lives in an age incomparably 
more wonderful in many ways than that of Thucydides, he knows 
better than to despise the past. On the contrary, he turns all the 
more to the study of what is obscure in the detail of former civiliza- 
tions. He does so not to supply lessons to statesmen, which was 
the main purpose of Thucydides, but from the conviction, forced 
home by science, that only through a knowledge of how things 
came about can we understand what they are. He has a vision of 
the eternal Hnking of past and present, of the progressive creation 
of evolving societies, which no antique man could possibly have 
seen. The insignificant gains significance when fitted into such a 
scheme, just as each stone is necessary in a temple wall. Science 
builds up its structures out of the neglected data of the common- 
place and the science of history has learned from it never to de- 
spise a past however obscure it seems ; for its fragmentary evidence 
may furnish the clue for the recovery of some vanished civiliza- 
tion or the explanation of otherwise inexplicable elements in a later 
one. 

The fact is that where science has thus determined the outlook 
of the modern historian, poetry determined that of Thucydides. 
He would have vigorously denied it, but the case is clear. The 
epic — or perhaps dramatic — ideal of a great story of great deeds 
was his ideal of history as well. The contrast between this and the 
scientific outlook escapes us, because historians have generally 
followed the same poetic tendencies down even to our own time, 
seizing great themes under a sense that they alone were worthy of 
great histories. Now, however, the men of scientific temper see 
things differently. They find their theme just where the great 
masters refused to look, — in such a past as that which Thucydides 
ignored because it was ''not great either in wars or in anything 
else." The result is that, for the first time, history is disclosing 
its hidden perspectives and the past is taking on some of the color 
of reahty. 

^ . Thucydides failed to appreciate these things not from any 
personal limitations, but because he hved before scientific history 
was possible. He had the scientific temper, for he investigated 
everything for himself, even what he omitted. But science demands 



170 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

more than individual genius ; it rests upon the cooperative work of 
many minds, amassing data and preparing implements for others 
still to use. It is a social phenomenon, indeed the most highly 
socialized there is, for the economics of the search for truth en- 
counters no such individuahstic tendencies as the economics of 
the search for wealth. So the investigator of today has ready 
at his disposal a vast array of facts already estabhshed and duly 
classified. Thucydides had no such heritage. He had an archae- 
ologist's eye for the use of monuments as historical sources, for he 
observed the broken fragments of pillars in the walls of Athens and 
quoted the fact as a vivid proof of his account of how those walls 
were rebuilt after the Persian war. He even used inscriptions 
when they came his way. But it is a long step from such anti- 
quarian interest — promising as it is — to the systematic investi- 
gation of monuments. He could only speculate as to the wealth of 
Agamemnon, little suspecting that the treasure chambers of 
Mycenae lay waiting for a spade. Minos was to him but a name 
from the borderland of legend and history ; now the excavations of 
Cnossus have made it a term in scientific chronology. No prophecy 
of genius could foretell that, when the search was wide enough, 
and the implements for it sufficiently perfected, the merest trifles 
of antiquity would take on the significance of historical records; 
that bits of tombstones and scraps of papyri would enable us to 
reconstruct the history of vanished centuries, or help us to correct 
the narrative of great historians. 

a But the chief handicap of the antique historian, in dealing with 
the past, was an absence of exact chronology. It is hard for us 
to realize what a handicap this was. Yet the more we examine 
the history of History the more it becomes apparent that until 
time was measured it was not appreciated. We have already seen 
that it took many ages of Babylonian and later Egyptian history 
for the mathematics of the calendar to straighten out the tangles 
of days, months and years, until a systematic chronology became 
possible. In the Greece of Thucydides' day, the problem had not 
yet been solved, and the perspective of the past was, as a result, 
blurred and uncertain. The only historian who had attempted 
to open it up, by a systematic chronology of Athens, was Hellanicus, 
and Thucydides soon discovered how unreliable his reckoning was. 



THUCYDIDES 171 

But it is a remarkable fact that he did not try to correct or improve 
upon it. He frankly gave up the problem, and fell back upon the 
most primitive of all methods of reckoning time, that of the old 
farmer's calendar of the seasons. Summer and winter are all he 
needs, the summer for fighting, the winter for poUtics. This is all 
he needs for the greatest war of antiquity.^ Beyond those passing 
years lay obscurity — and relative insignificance. He saw no long 
perspectives of the marshalled centuries, like the historian of today ; 
instead, he looked but vaguely into "the abysm and gulf of Time," 
and its darkness almost enveloped the events of his own day. 
^ If Thucydides lacked the prime qualification of a modern 
historian in his failure to handle time-perspectives, his choice of 
subject bears as well the marks and hmitations of the antique. 
He had no doubt but that war was the one and proper subject of 
history. Had this been true, and the Peloponnesian war, as he 
believed, the greatest of wars, his work would rank without a rival 
among the achievements of historians. For the very sternness 
with which he kept to his theme instead of offering us picturesque 
details of Greek society, as Herodotus would have done, would 
be in his favor. Yet even here, a merit may easily develop into a 
fault. Thucydides did more than cut out the digressions of a story- 
teller ; ^ he concentrated upon the war so intently as not only to 

^ The comment of Thucydides upon his use of this easy-going method of reckoning 
time is worth quoting. "Ten years, with a difference of a few days, had passed since 
the invasion of Attica and the commencement of the war. I would have a person 
reckon the actual periods of time, and not rely upon catalogues of the archons or 
other ofiBicial personages whose names may be used in different cities to mark the 
dates of past events. For whether an event occurred in the beginning or in the middle, 
or whatever might be the exact point, of a magistrate's term of ofl&ce is left un- 
certain by such a mode of reckoning. But if he measure by summers and winters 
as they are here set down, and count each summer and winter as a half year, he will 
find that teli summws and ten winters passed in the first part of the war." Bk. V, 
Chap. XX. This undoubtedly has its advantage for contemporary reckoning ; but 
Thucydides failed to see that the calendar of the war had also to be set in the chronicle 
of centuries. For other references to the calendar in Thucydides, cj. Bk. II, Chap. I : 
"The narrative is arranged according to summers and winters." Bk. II, Chap. XL VII : 
"As soon as sunmier returned, the Peloponnesian army . . . invaded Attica." Bk. 
Ill, Chap. I : "In the following summer when the corn was in full ear, the Pelopon- 
nesians and their allies . . . invaded Attica," etc. 

"^ It would be an interesting speculation to imagine Herodotus writing the history 
of the Peloponnesian war. We should know much more of the history of Greece. 
Thucydides holds himself so closely to the war itself that there areonly four digressions 



172 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

exaggerate its importance, — the very fault he found with the poets 
and chroniclers before him,^ — but even to weld the interrupted 
struggles of the Athenian and Spartan leagues into one and to give 
the impression that the attention of Greece of his time centred as 
exclusively upon the war as did his own. It has been said that 
OThucydides himself was the inventor of the war he narrates, and 
undoubtedly he cherished a fixed idea concerning it ; for, as he 
tells us in the opening sentence, he foresaw its significance from the 
first, a confession which shows the limitations of his outlook, — 
which is after all but another name for a biassed mind. So, although 
subsequent events to a large degree justified his foresight and 
approved his perspective, there was undoubtedly some manipula- 
tion of the data to make the continuity so clear and to ensure that 
the national tragedy develop as a tragedy should — impelled by 
the wilful passions of men under the hand of fate.^ 

Fortunately, even the story of a war extends beyond the field 
of battle ; it includes as well the politics of the combatants. For 
one must listen to the speeches in council and watch the moving 
of the public mind to explain the formation of alliances and the 
plan of campaigns. So Thucydides interspersed his account of 
military operations with a history of politics. Indeed he seems to 
have spent upon it more elaborate care than upon the details of 
fighting. This, in the eyes of most of his critics, serves at once to 
distinguish him from all his predecessors. He had left behind the 
tales of heroes which still evoked the story-telling qualities of 
Herodotus. Poets and chroniclers "who write to please the ear" are 
scornfully dismissed for a study of statecraft and generalship. But 
this is not a history of Greek politics ; it is only a history of the politics 
of the war. The student of history finds in Thucydides almost as 
little light upon the general character of political constitutions of 

in the whole history, after he once gets through the introduction. Because he plunges 
into the war itself (Bk. I, Chap. XXIII) at the opening of his narrative, he reverts, 
in an excursus, to the history of Athens since the Persian war (Bk. I, Chaps. 
LXXXIX-CXVni). In addition to this he inserts a short account of affairs in 
Thrace (Bk. II, Chaps. XCVI-CI), a description of Sicily (Bk. VI, Chaps. I-V), and 
a criticism of the received tradition of the overthrow of the house of Pisistratus 
(Bk. VI, Chaps. LIV-LIX). In each place Herodotus would have been tempted to 
insert a book. 

1 Cf. Thucydides [History of the Peloponnesian War], Bk. I, Chaps. X, XXI. 

* Cf. F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, Part II. 



THUCYDIDES 173 

Greek states as the student of culture does of their life and 
thought.^ 

We shall of course be reminded that Thucydides should not be 
held responsible for these omissions, for he was not writing con- 
stitutional or cultural history. But that is just the point we wish 
to make. -vThe scope of Thucydides is limited by that of a war 
which few of us care to follow — in detail — were it not that the 
genius of the author holds us to the task, like some inexorable 
tutor with whom one reads for imaginary examinations. Disci- 
pUne and profit accrue to the reader, and the text is one of the 
noblest products of antiquity ; but it fails to answer the questions 
we have most at heart. 

The chief weakness in this story of politics, however, is the 
failure to look beyond personal motives for causes. There is an 
almost complete blindness to economic forces. To Thucydides this 
was a world where men willed and wrought, of their own account, 
through the impulse of passion, and met success or frustration as 
Fortune (tvxv) meted it out. Fortune was the determining factor, 
the unknown quantity, the "x" in the problem; but it was con- 
ceived in terms of religion, not of business. It was the inexplicable 
Power, the Providence beyond the reckoning of history, the Luck 
which rules the primitive world, decked with the regalia of philo- 
sophic mysticism. Thucydides had no idea that Fortune, thi^ 
substitute for the caprice of the gods, was interested in the price of 
commodities. Conceiving it in terms of mystery, he traced its 
action but did not try to explain, — for there was no explanation. 
With us Fortune still plays its major role, but it suggests economics 
and invites investigation, for it is mainly a synonym for wealth. 
The very element in history which meant mystery to Thucydides 
is therefore offering to us the first glimpses of natural law in a 
natural instead of a spiritual world — the laws of supply and demand 
and all their implications. 

The shortcomings of Thucydides in this matter should not be 
overstated, for it would be absurd to the point of the grotesque 
to expect from him an economic interpretation of history. The 
economic interpretation of history is a very recent thing; it 

* To be sure the modem historian finds much illumination from many passages. 
But they are mainly incidental in the narrative. 



174 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

has not yet eliminated all the mystery of individual will and is not 
likely soon to do so. But it is just as absurd to claim for Thucydides 
a perception of universal laws for man and nature, and to regard his 
narrative as one conceived in the enlightenment of modem science. 
This is the point of view advanced by the older literary critics, 
whose appreciation of Thucydides has become the standard by 
which most readers hasten to adjust their own impressions. It is 
needless to point out further how such extravagant claims reveal 
rather the scientific limitations of their authors than the scientific 
triumphs of Thucydides. 

The result of our survey is the conclusion that the greatest 
historian of antiquity was impotent in two of the major require- 
ments of the modern historian : on the one hand the mastery of 
time-perspectives, the unravelling of the past ; on the other hand 
jthe handling of the impersonal forces, material and social, which 
modify if they do not govern the course of human events. This 
does not detract from the greatness of his performance; it 
could not have been otherwise. He did not have the chance to 
measure economic forces or chronology; the implements for 
doing so did not then exist. "We must constantly remind our- 
selves," says Mr. Cornford in his suggestive study of Thucydides 
Mythistoricus,^ "that Thucydides seemed to himself to stand on 
the very threshold of history. Behind him lay a past which, in 
comparison with ours, was unimaginably meagre. From beyond 
the Grecian seas had come nothing but travellers' tales of the 
eastern wonderland. Within the tiny Hellenic world itself, the 
slender current of history flashed only here and there a broken 
gleam through the tangled overgrowth of legend and gorgeous 
flowers of poetry. ..." There was nothing to do with such a 
past but to leave it alone and turn to his great journalistic enter- 
prise of saving the world of fact in which he lived. Skepticism 
might keep him free from credulity, but it could not forge the tools 
for investigation. 

In short, the mind of Thucydides was neither primitive noFsv^ 

* F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 76. This most stimulating book on 
Thucydides lacks somewhat of Thucydidean caution in the way it forces home the 
comparison of the work with .(Eschylean tragedy. Nevertheless, in spite of the pro- 
test of classicists, it is a notable contribution to historical appreciation. 



THUCYDIDES 175 

modern; it was antique. No recognition of modern tendencies 
or capacities should blind us to its limitations. It moved with the 
precision of supreme self-consciousness, but within narrow confines 
both of time and space, — and by unknown frontiers. To quote 
Cornford again : "Thucydides lived at the one moment in recorded 
history which has seen a brilhantly intellectual society, nearly 
emancipated from a dying religion, and at the same time unaided 
by science, as yet hardly born. Nowhere but in a few men of that 
generation shall we find so much independence of thought combined 
with such destitute poverty in the apparatus and machinery of 
thinking. . . . We must rid our minds of scientific terminology as 
well as of religion and philosophy, if we are to appreciate the unique 
detachment of Thucydides' mind, moving in the rarest of atmos- 
pheres between the old age and the new. Descartes, for all his 
eJBforts, was immeasurably less free from metaphysical preoccupa- 
tion; Socrates appears, in comparison, superstitious." ^ 

Finally, there is one element in Thucydides' work which bears 
the mark of the antique on its face, — the speeches which he put 
into the mouths of his leading characters, and into which he com- 
pressed most of the poHtics and diplomacy of his history. Nothing 
could be more unmodern than this device. Imagine a Ranke 
inventing or even elaborating orations for modern statesmen and 
then embodying them into his narrative! One cannot supply 
speeches for historical characters unless one has the text, and where 
the Thucydides of antiquity labored most, the Thucydides of today 
would give up the task. Even from the standpoint 'of art, the 
speeches seem now incongruous and unreal. As Macaulay said of 
them, "They give to the whole book something of the grotesque 
character of those Chinese pleasure-grounds, in which perpendicular 
rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Inven- 
tion is shocking where truth is in such close juxtaposition with it." ^ 

But we must not be too sure of our judgment, either of the 
antique or the Chinese. Each must be judged in its own environ- 
ment. Certainly no one in Ancient Greece or Rome could have 
guessed that a historian would ever object to the making of orations 
as a legitimate part of historical narrative. Speech-making in 
story-telling is as old as story. It is natural in all primitive narra- 
» Ibid., pp. 73, 74. 2 Essay on History. 



r" 



176 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

tion. AU good story-tellers put words into the mouths of their 
heroes. They do this, not as conscious artifice, but simply because 
their minds work naturally in dramatic mimicry — the mimicry 
which is a direct legacy from the most primitive form of thought and 
its expression. This is the explanation of much of what seems to 
us either naive or questionable in the Old Testament, where the 
words of the patriarchs and of Jahveh are given in direct narration 
by authors of a millennium later than the recorded conversations. 
There, however, as in Herodotus, the general background of the 
story was in tone with such primitive dramatizing. In Thucydides 
the case is different ; his mind did not naturally work like that of a 
gossip or a raconteur, by the impersonation of others. He kept to 
the old devices, and made up speeches to suit his story ; but the con- 
tent does not suit the form, and in the ears of a modern the thing 
rings false. 

Yet we should not forget that Thucydides wrote for Greeks, not 
for us. The incongruity is there because the work survives into 
another age, when the clamor of the agora is stilled, and people read 
instead of Usten. Oratory no longer determines the fate of states. 
The sneers of Bismarck at its impotence are justified. The forces 
that move events in the modern world seldom find expression at all, 
and if they do they are more likely to be embodied in figures than 
in words. This was partly true too in the ancient world, truer than 
Thucydides could have suspected. But it is well, after aU, that he 
did not; for he had no means for handling it, and would have 
merely obscured his narrative had he attempted it. As it was, he 
left us, besides the story of war, a picture of the leadership of men, 
of great speakers swaying the passions of uncertain crowds, of 
councils listening to the thrusts of keen debate. If we are always 
conscious, as we look at these scenes, that we see them through the 
eyes of an interpreter, we at least have the satisfaction of knowing 
that our interpreter was, of aU who saw them, the one best fitted 
to transmit them to posterity. 

Thucydides began his history with the expression of haughty 
scorn for the tales of poets in the youth of Hellas ; prose, not poetry, 
is the medium for truth. With this judgment the modern critic 
agrees, and prosy historians have found in it much consolation and 
encouragement. But prose in the hands of Thucydides was not a 



THUCYDIDES 177 

bare shroud upon dead facts to ensure them decent burial in ponder- 
ous books, it was a work of art in itself, as nervous with life and 
energy when moving with the war-bands or the fleet as it was keyed 
to the eloquence of Athenian oratory when dealing with politics 
and diplomacy. His work was the result of long and painstaking 
researches, — at times he breaks his impersonal reserve to tell us so,^ 
— but he did not consider it complete until the elements of which 
it was composed were worked over so as to lose their outlines in the 
structure of the whole. Unlike Herodotus he tried to obhterate 
his sources in the interest of art.^ Fortunately the art was noble 
enough to compensate for the loss of the materials, and secured 
for the facts themselves an immortality which they alone could 
never have attained. But there was danger in this polishing of 
text. Thucydides himself was not the victim of rhetoric ; he lived 
and wrote before the schoolmen had fettered language into styles, 
and he could hardly have surmised that the very passages upon 
which he concentrated the mastery of his art would exemplify a 
tendency hardly less fatal to history than the naive credulity of the 
early poets, a tendency to sacrifice substance for form — in prose. 
How real the danger was, the subsequent chapters of antique his- 
toriography show. But Thucydides stands out in as strong con- 
trast against the age of rhetoric as against that of poetry. In him 
the antique spirit is revealed at its best ; but it was antique. 

1 C/. Thucydides [History of the Peloponnesian War], Bk. I, Chaps. I, XX, XXII, 
Bk. V, Chap. XXVI. 

* So definitely is this the case that one can readily detect where his hand had not 
given the final touch. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Standard critical editions of the text of Thucydides are those of J. Classen 
(8 vols., 1862-1878, sth ed., 1914- ) and I. Bekker (1821, 3d ed., 1892). 
Other convenient editions are those of H. S. Jones (Oxford Library of Classical 
Authors, 2 vols. [1902]), and C. Hude (2 vols., ed. maior, Teubner, 1901-1913). 
The English translation of B. Jowett (i86i, 2d ed., 1900) is a classic itself. 
This translation has been used in the text. The Loeb Classical Library is 
bringing out a translation of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War by C. F. Smith. 
Two volumes have already appeared. For textual study see the illuminating 
work of W. R. Lamb, Clio Enthroned (1914). For general discussions see the 
histories of Greek literature: G. Murray (1912) ; J. P. Mahaffy, A History of 
Classical Greek Literature (2 vols., 1880, 3d ed., 1890-1891), Vol. II, Pt. I, 
Chap. V ; A. and M. Croiset (5 vols., 2d ed., 1896-1899, 3d ed.. Vols. I-III, 



178 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

1910-1914), Vol. IV, pp. 87-172; W. V. Christ (sth and 6th ed., 1908-1913) 
(6th ed.), Vol. I, pp. 476-493. See also J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek His- 
torians (1909), Lects. III-IV, pp. 75-149; G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler, 
Hellenic Civilization (1915), for extracts. Accounts and critical estimates of 
Thucydides will be found in all the larger Greek histories, but by far the most 
thoroughgoing is that in G. Busolt, Griechische Geschichte (3 vols., 1893- 1904), 
Vol. Ill 2, PP- 616-693. See also G. B. Grundy, Thucydides and the History 
of His Age (191 1) ; E. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (2 vols., 1892- 
1899), Vol. II {Thucydides), pp. 269-436. Of especial interest is F. M. Corn- 
ford's Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907), but see the reviews by B. Perrin in 
The American Historical Review, Vol. XIII (1908), pp. 314-316; T. Lenschau, 
in Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, Vol. XXXi (1907), p. 229 ("seit 
Ed. Meyers Abhandlungen die bedeutendste Erscheinung der Thukydides- 
Litteratur") ; E. Lange, in Jahresbericht ilber die Fortschritte der klassischen 
Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. CXXXVIII (1908), pp. 119 sqq. For the life of 
Thucydides see U. v. Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, Die Thukydideslegende, in 
Hermes, Vol. XII (1877), pp. 326 sqq.; but see R. Scholl, in ibid., Vol. XIII 
(1878), pp. 433 sqq., and G. F. Unger, in JahrbUcher jur classische Philologie, 
Vol. CXXXIII (1886), pp. 97 sqq., 145 sqq.; A. Bauer, Die Forschungen zur 
griechischen Geschichte (1899), pp. 210 sqq.; E. Lange, in Philologus, Vol. LVII 
(1898), pp. 465 sqq. For his sources, see H. Stein, Ztir Quellenkritik des Thu- 
kydides, in Rheinisches Museum, Vol. LV (1900), pp. 531 sqq.; and the reply of 
J. Steup, Thukydides, Antiochos und die angebliche Biographie des Hermokrates 
in ibid.. Vol. LVI (1901), pp. 443 sqq.; A. Kirchhoflf, Thukydides und sein 
Urkundenmaterial (1895) ; L. Herbst, Zur Urkunde in Thukydides, in Hermes, 
Vol. XXV (1890), pp. 374 sqq. In general see E. Meyer {Thukydides und die 
Entstehung der wissenschajtlichen Geschichte), in Mitteilungen des Vereins der 
Freunde des humanistischen Gymnasiums, Vienna, Vol. XIV; M. Biidinger, 
Poesie und Urkunde bei Thukydides (1891) ; R. C. Jebb {Speeches of Thucyd- 
ides), in Essays and Addresses (1907), pp. 359-445; Th. Gomperz, Griechische 
Denker (3 vols., 1896-1902), Vol. I, pp. 408-413; G. Busolt, in Klio, Vol. V 
(1905), pp. 255 sqq.; E. Kornemann, Thukydides und die romische Historiogra- 
phie, in Philologus, Vol. LXIII (1904), pp. 148 sqq.; J. E. Harrison, Primi- 
tive Athens as Described by Thucydides (1906). 

For recent literature, see Philologus, Vol. LVI (1897), pp. 658 sqq.; Vol. 
LVII (1898), pp. 436 sqq., for the years 1890-1897. See Jahresbericht iiber 
die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. C (1899), pp. 171 
sqq.; for 1888-1899; Vol. CXXV (1906), pp. 166 sqq., for 1900-1903; Vol. 
CXXXVIII (1908), pp. 119 sqq., for 1904-1907; Sup. Vol. CLI (1911), pp. 
372 sqq. E. Drerup, Die historische Kunst der Griechen, Festschrift fiir W. v. 
Christ, JahrbUcher fiir classische Philologie, Sup. Vol. XXVII, pp. 443 sqq.; 
F. Jacoby, Uber die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie, in Klio, Vol. 
IX (1909), pp. 80 sqq. 



CHAPTER XV 
RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP 

Thucydides left almost no impress upon subsequent Greek 
historians. He remained a great name ; but few read and fewer 
imitated him. His severe yet lofty style and his passion for the 
truth were foreign to the taste of the age that followed.^ For 
although history did not revert to poetry, it passed into the field of 
rhetoric, where the ideal was a striving for efifect rather than for 
fact. It was not until in the first century B.C., when the old Greek 
classics were revived, that Thucydides became once more an 
influence, or rather an ideal. But to trace this farther carries us 
to Rome. Moreover between Thucydides and the rhetoricians lay 
another historian, known to all those who even begin the study of 
Greek, to whom we must now turn, though only for a hurried 
glance. 

Alongside Herodotus and Thucydides, the ancients placed 
Xenophon, the three forming for them the trio of great Greek 
historians. Modern criticism has a much lower opinion of Xeno- 
phon. Soldier of fortune, student of philosophy, intimately ac- 
quainted with the men and events of an age fateful both for Greece 
and for the history of the world, he caught no gleam of its larger 
meaning, gained no sense of the causes and little appreciation of 
the results of the happenings he chronicled. The sudden fall of 
Sparta, for instance, he attributed not to its own rather obvious 
faults but to the direct action of the gods. Neither Greek nor 
Persian history was clear to him in its tendencies and significance. 

To quote the discriminating judgment of Professor Bury : 

" In history as in philosophy he was a dilettante. . . . He had 
a happy literary talent, and his multifarious writings, taken together, 

^ Bury, following Wilamowitz-MoUendorff, points out that it was not an age 
favorable to the composition of political history in any case. The engrossing intel- 
lectual interest was then political science. And one need only look into the treatises on 
political science written by the theorist today to see how history suffers ! 

179 



i8o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

render him an interesting figure in Greek literature. But his mind 
was essentially mediocre, incapable of penetrating beneath the 
surface of things. If he had lived in modern days, he would have 
been a high-class journalist and pamphleteer ; he would have made 
his fortune as a war-correspondent; and would have written the 
life of some mediocre hero of the stamp of Agesilaus. So far as 
history is concerned, his true vocation was to write memoirs. The 
Anabasis is a memoir, and it is the most successful of his works. 
It has the defects which memoirs usually have, but it has the 
merits, the freshness, the human interest of a personal document. 
The adventures of the Ten Thousand are alive forever in Xeno- 
phon's pages." ^ 

This adverse judgment of the modern critic would seem to 
leave Xenophon but slight claim to consideration in a history of 
History. But we cannot get rid of him with quite so summary a 
dismissal. For the historical, as contrasted with the purely 
biographical, treatment demands of us that we keep in mind not 
simply the appraisal of his work today, but also the opinions of the 
successive generations of readers who have judged him differently 
than we. The very contrast between the high regard in which 
Xenophon was held by the ancients and the slight esteem of his 
modern critics, is itself a fact of real significance, — perhaps the 
most significant one which the work of Xenophon presents for us. 
To Cicero, for instance, and to the great cultured world for which 
he spoke — and still speaks — Xenophon was one of the world's 
classics. Why ? 

First of all there was his style, graphic, entertaining, har- 
monious, " sweeter than honey " as Cicero said, not heavy with 
ill-assorted facts nor dulled by too much philosophy. But apart 
from style, there was his happy gift of portraiture and his descrip- 
tive concreteness. If he failed to get at the inner connection of 
events, he brought out all the more the personality of the in- 
dividual leaders. And after all, it is a fair question in some stages 
of history, whether the events that offer themselves to the nar- 
rator are as worth considering as the characters of the actors. 
However unenlightened Xenophon may have been as to the pro- 
cesses of history, as a memoir-writer he contributed largely to the 

* J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 151-152. 



RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP i8i 

little there was of that high-class journalism which draws its charm 
from an interest in people. The appreciation of Xenophon by 
the ancients was therefore based upon real qualities ; and although 
they are insufficient to enable him to hold his place in the present, 
when the standards of history reflect the wider vision of the social 
sciences and demand a control of causal perspectives, still they 
are qualities which endure. 

Xenophon was born about the opening of the Peloponnesian 
war, and died when the power of Macedon was already threatening 
to close the last troubled era of Greek freedom (c. 430-354 B.C.). 
As a young Athenian noble he became a disciple of Socrates and 
preserved his " recollections " (Memorabilia) of his teacher in four 
books, which present the homely detail of an observer rather than 
of a thinker and the less abstruse side of Socrates' philosophy. It is 
unfortunate for him that Plato's account lies alongside to invite 
comparison. Very few historians, not to mention journalists, 
would measure up well with such a rival. As it is, however, the 
Memorabilia is an invaluable human document. It also affords 
precious glimpses of the social life of the time. But though this 
unenlightened pupil of Socrates failed to get at the inner connec- 
tion of events, he brought out all the more the personality of the 
individual leaders. 

Of vastly different content is the Anabasis, a narrative of the war 
of Cyrus the Younger against Artaxerxes his royal brother, and of 
the retreat of the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries in the service 
of Cyrus. Xenophon was elected their general after the death of 
Cyrus, and his narrative — the best known manual to beginners of 
the study of Greek — remains a clear picture of the marching sol- 
diers and of the hinterland through which they passed. Moreover, 
his description of places and his geography generally have the merit, 
rarer than one suspects, of being relatively accurate. 

The formal effort of Xenophon at the writing of history, how- 
ever, was not the Anabasis but the Hellenica, an attempt to / 
carry on the history of Thucydides, — completing the Pelopon- 
nesian war from the autumn of 411 B.C. and terminating at 
Mantinea in 362. But it is very unlike Thucydides, in both 
outlook and style. It moves in lively narrative and where a bare 
story of intricate events would pall, it interjects personal descrip- 



182 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

tions drawn to the life. Indeed, so well are these done, that the 
reader's interest is kept stimulated where otherwise it would flag. 
So, although there is an undue proportion of this descriptive 
material, it is so successfully handled as almost to turn a defect 
into a merit. There was an excuse as well in the theme itself. 
It lacked that large, compelling epic quahty which lay inherent 
in the Persian wars of Herodotus and that dramatic unity which 
Thucydides revealed in the struggle against Athenian supremacy. 
The pattern of Greek history was becoming more puzzling, the 
isolation of even the more inland states was giving way, and 
their interaction becoming more varied. If a Thucydides failed 
to estimate the economic forces behind the fortunes and poUcies 
of his time, Xenophon should not be blamed too much for sharing 
the weakness of all antiquity in this regard. The Hellenica was 
written while he was in exile from Athens, and presents the 
later history of Greece from the Spartan point of view. The 
Peloponnesians were having their day, as the Athenians had had 
theirs when Thucydides wrote. But the times were no longer great. 
When one recalls what Sparta was, — its arid intellectual soil, 
its unadjustable hardness, its parochial militarism, — one is surely 
justified LQ tempering justice with charity in judging the limitations 
of outlook shown by a writer living under its domination ; even 
if, beyond the narrowing horizon of politics and culture, he could, 
looking back, recall the inspiration of a great adventure with ten 
thousand Greeks in Asia, or, better still, could treasure as a lasting 
possession the personal memories of Socrates. 

Between Xenophon and Polybius we come upon a period which 
is difficult for us to appreciate justly, the age of the rhetorician.* 
The very name is forbidding. Formal rhetoric not only repels 
the scientist, it has even lost its charm as an art. We find it hard 
to be patient with mere words when we have so rich a world of 
real experience to draw upon, and few who study the evolution 
of history can repress a condemnation of the pupils of Isocrates. 
The condemnation is justified from the standpoint of science; 
rhetoric played too great a r61e in the antique culture, and facts 

1 Vide R. C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isatis (2 vols., 1876, 2d 
ed., 1893). 



RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP 183 

too little. But the historian of History must temper his con- 
demnation or run the risk of becoming unhistorical. Given the 
antique world as it was, he should not expect it to achieve the 
modern method. The art of Demosthenes was as fitting and noble 
an expression of the maturity of Greek genius as was the Homeric 
epic of its youth. From the standpoint of science, the Greek mind 
was always hampered by its art. This was true of a philosopher 
like Plato and a historian like Thucydides; it could hardly fail 
to be true, in a different sense, of those who lived in an age when 
the great creations of that art were already their heritage. 

Rhetoric is to us largely a subject for school children, and is 
branded in later life with the scorn of things immature; but the 
Greek ideal was not altogether vain. The great art of expression 
by words is surely as worthy one's study as arts which live in color 
or stone. At once plastic and monumental, preserving the form and 
color of reality by the choice of the clear-cut word or the finely 
moulded phrase, rhetoric elevates the prose of literature to replace 
the vanishing art of poetry. Its field in antiquity, however, was 
limited. The ancient city lacked the varied scope of modern 
journalism; its interests were mainly local, and its literature was 
spoken rather than written. In a country where the theatre took 
the place of our libraries, and where even philosophy was largely .^ 
dialogue, it was but natural that rhetoric should, in its higher 
forms, tend to be practically a synonym for oratory.^ Moreover, 
oratory, in a Greek city, was a real force. The arena of politics 
was hardly larger than the amphitheatre or the agora, and it was 
possible to control it almost as definitely by the voice and person- 
ality of a speaker. But oratory was not confined to politics. It 
was an art cultivated for itself, like music today, and "people went 
to hear an oratorical display just as we go to hear a symphony." ^ 
It was therefore inevitable that speech-making should over-run the 
narrative of history and the play upon language over-run speech- 
making ; as inevitable as that the histories of the nineteenth cen- 
tury should be couched so largely in the terms of national politics, 
or those of the twentieth include the survey of economics and the 

* On the other hand the rhetor's work in the general art or discipline of speaking 
was almost synonymous with education. 

* J. B. Bury, op. cit., p. 174. 



i84 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

sciences. The invention of orations in history, which, as we have 
seen, has its origins in primitive story-telling, and which Thucydides 
took over from his predecessors as a natural part of his expression, 
became, in the age which followed, a dej&nite part of the historian's 
trade, and not more in Greece than in Rome, which was to receive 
much of its education at the hands of the Greek rhetor. So Livy 
clogged his moving narrative with long discourses, and even Caesar, 
orator as well as soldier, would halt the charge, as it were, to deliver 
through the mouth of the general some unnecessary harangue. 

Yet, as we have seen in the case of Thucydides, what seems to 
us artifice was often genuine art. The orations which are now so 
futile and unreal gave to the antique mind the very reflection of 
reality. We must judge the antique historian only by living through 
the politics of agora or forum in the small Mediterranean cities 
where the living voice was both journalism and literature, and 
where the destiny of a state might at any time be decided by the 
power of a ringing speech. Yet one may carry the historic imagina- 
tion too far, and excuse too much. The rhetoric which brought 
popularity to the historian of the third century B.C. brought him 
just as surely the neglect of later times. 

Formal rhetoric, however, did not limit itself to the speeches. 
Such obvious devices did perhaps less damage to historiography 
than the general tendency which they represented to sacrifice 
accuracy for effect. History, at best a poor enough mirror of 
reality, is readily warped by art ; and rhetoric is art of the most ^/ 
formal kind. It distorts into ordered arrangement the haphazard, 
unformed materials which chance produces or preserves. It sets 
its pieces like an impresario and completes with convincing ele- 
gance the abrupt and incomplete dramas of reality. All history- 
writing does this to some degree, since it is art. But rhetoric 
passes easily over into the sphere of conscious distortion. A 
phrase is worth a fact ; and facts must fit the liking of the audience, 
or serve to point a moral. As few facts in reality do lend themselves 
readily to these moral and aesthetic purposes, the rhetorician re- 
adjusts the story to his needs.^ 

The age that followed Thucydides and Xenophon was domi- 

^ C/. W. V. Christ, Gesckichte der griechischen Litteratur (sth ed.), Vol. II, pp. 228- 
23s, 348-367- 



RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP 185 

nated by the influence of Isocrates. Few men have impressed 
themselves upon an art more pirofoundly than he. His canons 
of style were not only to prevail in the Greece of his day, but to 
pass on, through the rich rhythmic periods of Cicero, to mould 
the prose of many a modem author. Fortunately, however, this 
master of style contributed as well to history a widened outlook 
into the Hellenic world. He viewed the politics of Greece as 
essentially one, and sought to inspire a common patriotism by 
appealing to the pride of all in the achievements of a single city.^ 
The glory of Athens, its services to Greece and the lessons of its 
democracy were held up to other states as an ideal for the future. 
But the forces of the world today are never those of yesterday, 
and when the long spears of Macedon wrecked instead of realized 
the dreams of the great orators who shed such lustre upon the 
last age of Greek liberty, there was left only history in which to 
embody the ideal of Isocrates. 

The first general historian of the Hellenic world, and one of the 
most popular in antiquity, was Ephorus, to whom, according to ' 
Photius, Isocrates assigned the task of preserving the more distant 
past in fitting mould.^ He was not uncritical when dealing with both 
chronology and myth,^ but he rejected the ideal of Thucydides to 
keep his speeches closely modelled upon the originals. He frankly 
made them up, and was especially given to harangues upon the 
field of battle.^ Yet he seems to have had a sense of their proper 
use, for Polybius, who was a keen judge, says that he has "a most 
elegant and convincing digression on this very subject of a com- 
parison between historians and speech-makers," ^ and speaks of the 

1 In his insistence upon the need of a general war of all Greece with Persia in 
order to unite the Greeks, using Philip as the weapon and instrument, Isocrates' 
reliance upon a military salvation reminds one of Bismarckian tactics. The death 
of the orator, then in his ninety-eighth year, followed immediately upon Chaeronea. 

2 Cf. Photius, Bibliotheca, Chap. CLXXVI (Cf. A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de 
la litterature grecque, 2d ed., Vol. IV, pp. 656-657). Diodorus and Strabo also re- 
lied largely upon Ephorus for the field he covered. Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst 
(1911), pp. 151 sqq. 

' Cf. E. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Gesckichte, Vol. I, pp. 186 sqq. The in- 
fluence of Isocrates shows itself especially in his smooth-flowing style, tending, how- 
ever, toward a languid difluseness. 

* Cf. Plutarch (Pracepta Gerendae Reipublicae, 803 b) includes Theopompus 
in this remark; cf. W. v. Christ, op. cit. (6th ed.). Vol. I, pp. 529 sqq. 

8 The Histories of Polybius, Bk. XII, Chap. XXVIII. 



i86 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

work as a whole as "admirable throughout, in style, treatment, 
and argumentative acuteness." ^ 

The name most commonly Unked with that of Ephorus is Theo- 
pompus, to whom, according to the story cited above, Isocrates 
assigned the "modern" field, while he gave the past to Ephorus.^ 
In any case, he wrote two important histories, a continuation of 
Thucydides — the Hellenica (in twelve books), and a survey of 
contemporary Greek politics in the time of Philip — the Philippica 
(in fifty-eight books). He was gifted with a lively style and he 
employed all the artifices of rhetoric to secure effect, — a Greek 
Macaulay or Treitschke. Placed by the ancients in the front 
rank of historians, his work has suffered unduly from the ravages 
of time and changing taste. Little of what he wrote remains, 
his works not having been copied from their papyrus rolls into the 

* The Histories of Polybius, Bk. XII, Chap. XXVIII. Here, perhaps, mention 
should be made of the fragment of a Hellenica of greater value than that of 
Xenophon, which was published in 1908 by B. G. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt in 
Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part V, pp. 143 sqq., since the most recent commentator, 
E. M. Walker, in his lectures entitled The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, its Authorship 
and Authority (Oxford, 1913) decides for Ephorus. It had been attributed to 
Theopompus by Eduard Meyer (Theopomps Hellenika, 1909), who compared the 
author to Schlosser or Macaulay, by Busolt, Wilamowitz, and in a sense, perhaps, by 
the editors of the text. Against this conclusion were also ranged such scholars as 
Blass, Judeich, Lehmann-Haupt, Beloch, De Sanctis, and most English scholars (see 
literature in Walker, op. cit., Lect. I). Bury (Ancient Greek Historians) argued for 
Cratippus, a younger contemporary of Thucydides, who continued his work. Cra- 
tippus had objected to the speeches in Thucydides and there are none in this Hellenica. 
For the other fragments of Cratippus see C. Miiller, Fragmenta Historicorum Groecorum, 
Vol. II, pp. 75 sqq. G. W. Botsford {Hellenic Civilization, Chap. I, Sect. 9, p. 40) is 
inclined to accept Cratippus as the author. 

* Cicero's chief comment deals with the contrast in the style of the two pupils 
of Isocrates. Cf. De Oratore, Bk. Ill, Chap. IX : " We see that from the same 
schools of artists and masters, eminent in their respective pursuits, there have gone 
forth pupils very unlike each other, yet all praiseworthy, because the instruction of 
the teacher has been adapted to each person's natural genius ; a fact cf which the 
most remarkable example (to say nothing of other sciences) is that sa)ring of 
Isocrates, an eminent teacher of eloquence, that he used to apply the spur to 
Ephorus, but to put the rein on Theopompus; for the one, who overleaped all 
bounds in the boldness of his expressions, he restrained; the other who hesitated 
and was bashful, as it were, he stimulated : nor did he produce in them any resem- 
blance to each other, but gave to the one such an addition, and retrenched from the 
other so much superfluity, as to form in both that excellence of which the natuial 
genius of each was susceptible." (Watson's translation.) 

There is a similar remark in Brutus, Chap. LVI. 



RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP 187 

codices which might have insured their preservation.^ He travelled 
extensively and saw things at first hand; he was an insatiable 
investigator ; yet the exigencies of style and a biassed mind vitiated 
his work.^ 

Standing apart from the influence of Isocrates, and keenly 
criticising Ephorus and Theopompus, was Timaeus, the Sicilian, 
who passed fifty years of his life at Athens busied with antiquarian 
researches. He it was who instituted in history that dating by 
Olympiads which henceforth became the Greek standard of chronol- 
ogy for historians and the learned world, although it never was 
adopted into common use. He was an indefatigable worker and 
investigator, and if he was a pedant who lacked discrimination and 
that knowledge of the world which enables one to judge men and 
describe events, he furnished the historians who followed with 
much information otherwise lost. But he was biassed and unfair, 
lacking not only the larger vision but the judicial mind, and his 
attack upon his predecessors was the text of a more crushing attack 
upon himself by Polybius, who devotes his whole twelfth book to 
little more than this purpose. Polybius scorns this mere dry-as- 
dust who spent his time in libraries and never saw the world, and 
who is a stickler for small points while he fails to see the large ones. 
But however much remained to criticise in the actual achievement 
of Timaeus, it was something to have him protest that "history 
differs from rhetorical composition as much as real buildings 
differ from those represented in scene-paintings " ; and again, 
that "to collect the necessary materials for writing history is by 
itself more laborious than the whole process of producing rhetorical 
compositions." ^ 

* Diodorus already, in the first century B.C., reported the loss of rolls of Theo- 
pompus (. . . Bibliothecae Historicae, Bk. XVI, Chap. Ill, Sect. 8). 

' Fragments in C. Miiller, Fragmenta Historicorum Gracorum, Vol. I, pp. 278-333; 
Vol. IV, pp. 643-645. 

» Quoted by Polybius, The Histories, Bk. XII, Chap. XXVIII a. (Shuckburgh's 
translation.) 

These researches of Timasus in chronology naturally bring up a very knotty 
problem, that of the material upon which he could draw. We have seen the general 
character of the work of Hellanicus, the one standard authority in chronology. After 
him chronicles of Athens (AUhides) continued to be written, and grew in scope to in- 
clude all kinds of happenings. A line of Atthid writers developed, somewhat like 
the Pontifical annalists at Rome. (J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, p. 183.) 



i88 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

No Greek historian arose to handle the greatest political achieve- 
ment of the Hellenic race — the Alexandrine empire. Ephorus 
had written the national story down to 356, and Theopompus had 
covered the age of Philip. There they stopped. To the Hellenistic 
world this was like the Old Testament story of JudaE;a to the Chris- 
tians. But the story of the great Diaspora, of the spreading of the 
Greeks through all the Orient, of the building of new cities and plant- 
ing of Hellenic colonies over to the heart of Asia, of the widening 
of language and the vital contact with Oriental science, religion 
and philosophy, all this remained unwritten by competent hands. 
The Greeks, at the moment when their history seemed ended, 
emerged upon the theatre of world history, not as local patriots nor 
the art creators of single cities, but as the trained and competent 
interpreters of the more universal phases of antique culture. The 
conquest of Alexander made possible a Hellenic Orient, — as great 
an event in the history of civilization as the Romanization of the 
West. But the epic of that conquest was never written, not even 
the prose of it, by men worthy of the theme. Fairy-like stories of 
Oriental splendor revealed in Susa or Babylon found ready credence, 
at a time when truth itself was so incredible ; and alongside of 
them are narratives of some of Alexander's generals and subsequent 
rulers, like blue-books among fiction. Yet the Herodotus of the 
revanche was missing. Instead, the last great Greek historian was 

Of these, Androtion, the pupil of Isocrates, whose Atthis appeared in 330, was the 
main source for Aristotle's Constitution of Athens. (See articles in Pauly-Wissowa 
and G. De Sanctis, L'Attide di Androzione e un papirio di Oxyrhynchos in Atti delta 
reale accademia delle scienze di Torino, Vol. XLIII, 1908, pp. 331-356), although 
scholars have seriously considered whether the Constitution was not actually written 
by Philochorus, the last, and greatest, of the Atthid writers. (See J. H. Wright in 
American Journal of Philology, Vol. XII, 1891.) Bury {op. cit., p. 183) goes so far 
as to say that "the recovery of Philochorus would mean a greater addition to our his- 
torical knowledge than the 'AOrjvaluv UoXirela." This last work is the only one of 
the numerous historical treatises of Aristotle which has been recovered. It was found 
in Egypt in 1890. F. G. Kenyon's text (1891, 1892) and translation (1912) are the 
best. See bibliography in G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler, Hellenic Civilization, 
Chap. I, Sect. 9. This work does not entitle Aristotle to a place among the great 
historians. Under his direction a collection of 158 constitutions of states was made 
for a comparative study of politics. In a sense, therefore, Aristotle's place in the 
history of constitutional government is that of a scientific pioneer. But he seems 
to resemble an antique Montesquieu rather than a Stubbs or Waitz, to whom Bury 
(p. 182) compares him. 



RHETORIC AND SCHOLARSHIP 189 

a hostage at Rome, writing in the house of Scipio the story of the 
rise of the western imperial republic whose armies he himself saw 
sacking the treasures of Corinth when Greece became a Roman 
province. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The most recent edition of Xenophon's works is that edited by E. C. 
Marchant (5 vols., Vols. I-IV [1900-1910]). There are several good editions. 
The translation of all the works by H. G. Dakyns (4 vols., Vols. I-III, 1890- 
1897) is prefaced by a short biographical study. The Loeb Classical Library 
has announced a translation of Xenophon's Hellenica, Anabasis and Sympo- 
sium by C. L. Brownson. The first volume has appeared. J. B. Bury's 
judgment on Xenophon in The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 150 sqq., is most 
severe. See also H. G. Dakyns, in E. Abbott, Hellenica (2d ed., 1898), pp. 
296-352; Sir A. Grant, Xenophon (1871); A. Croiset, Xenophon, son carac- 
tere et son talent (1873) ; F. Le6, Die griechisch-romische Biographie (1901), 
pp. 87-93; H. A. Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften (5 vols., 1889-1904) {Aus Vor- 
lesungen ueher die Geschichte der griechischen Historiographie) {Charakteristik 
des Xenophon) , Vol. IV, pp. 328-335; E. Schwartz, in Rheinisches Museum, 
Vol. XLIV (1889) (Quellenuntersuchungen zur griechischen Geschichte), pp. 104 
sqq., 161 sqq. For other literature see Jahresbericht uber die Fortschritte der 
klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. CXVII (1903), pp. 47 sqq., for 1899- 
1902 ; Vol. CXLII (1909), pp. 341 sqq., for 1903-1908; Sup. Vol. CLI (1911), 
pp. 402 sqq. 

The classical work on the period between Xenophon and Polybius is 
R. C. Jebb's The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isceus (2 vols., 1876, 2d ed., 
1893), but the section devoted to The Attic Orators (Chap. I, Sect. 10) in G. 
W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler's Hellenic Civilization (191 5), is now the best 
guide. 

The works of Isocrates are edited by F. Blass (2 vols., 2d ed., Teubner, 
1885) and by E. Drerup (Vol. I, 1906). There is an English translation by 
J. H. Freese (Vol. I, 1894). See G. Murray (1912), pp. 341-352; A. and M. 
Croiset (5 vols., 2d ed., 1896-1899; 3d ed., Vols. I-III, 1910-1914), Vol. IV, 
pp. 465-505 ; W. V. Christ (5th and 6th ed., 1908-1913), (5th ed.), Vol. I, pp. 
531-545 ; J- B. Bury (1909), pp. 160 sqq.; R. C. Jebb, Attic Orators, Vol. II, 
Chaps. XII-XVIII, pp. 1-267, especially Chap. XIII, pp. 34-58. See also 
R. V. Scala, Uber Isocrates und die Geschichtsschreibung, Versammlungen 
deutscher Philologen und Schulmdnner, 1891 (41 u., 42 vers.), pp. 102 sqq.; G. 
Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographic (1907), Vol. I, pp. 90 sqq.; Jahresbericht 
uber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Sup. Vol. CLI (1911), 
pp. 308 sqq.; Vol. CLII (191 1), pp. 76 sqq., for literature for 1886-1909. 

On Ephorus, see the article in Pauly-Wissowa's Real-Encyclopddie, Vol. 
VI, pp. 1-16. The fragments of his works are preserved in C. Muller, Frag- 



190 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

menta Historicorum GrcBcorum (s vols., 1841-1873), Vol. I, pp. 234-277, Vol. 
IV, pp. 641 sqq. See G. Murray, p. 389; A. and M. Croiset, Vol. IV, pp. 
655-662; W. V. Christ (5th ed.). Vol. I, pp. 498-501; J. B. Bury, pp. 163- 
165. See also B. Niese, Wann hat Ephorus sein Geschichtswerk geschriehen? 
in Hermes, Vol. XLIV (1909), pp. 170-178 ; E. Schwartz, Die Zeit des Ephorus, 
in ibid.. Vol. XLIV, pp. 481-502 ; R. Laqueur, Ephorus, in ibid., Vol. XL VI 
(191 1), pp. 161-206, 321-354; M. Biidinger, Universalhistorie im AUertum 

(i895),PP-32^?g. 

The fragments of Theopompus are collected in C. Miiller, Fragmenta His- 
toricum GrcBcorum, Vol. I, pp. 278-333; Vol. IV, pp. 643-645. See G. Mur- 
ray, pp. 389-390; A. and M. Croiset, Vol. IV, pp. 662-674; W. v. Christ (5th 
ed.), Vol. I, pp. 501-503; J. B. Bury, pp. 165-167. See also J. Dellios, Zur 
Kritik des Geschichtsschreibens Theopomps (1880) ; R. Hirzel, Zur Charakk- 
ristik Theopomps, in Rheinisches Museum, Vol. XL VII (1892), pp. 359-389; 
G. Busolt, Zur GlaubwUrdigkeit Theopomps, in Hermes, Vol. XLV (1910), pp. 
220-249 ; E. Rohde, Kleine Schriften (2 vols., 1901), Vol. I, pp. 345-346; Vol. 
II, pp. 19-25; W. Schranz, Theopomps Philippika (1912). 

The texts of Timaeus are collected in C. Miiller, Fragmenta Historicorum 
GrcBcorum, Vol. I, pp. 193-233. See the histories of Greek literature, G. Mur- 
ray, pp. 390 sq.; A. and M. Croiset, Vol. V, pp. 109-115; W. v. Christ (5th 
ed.). Vol. II, pp. 168-171; F. Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur 
in der Alexandrinerzeit (2 vols., 1891-1892), Vol. I, pp. 563-583; J. B. Bury, 
pp. 167-170. See also J. Geffcken, Timaios' Geographic des Westens (1892); 
C. Clasen, Historisch-kritische Untersuchung iiber Timaios von Tauromenion 
(1883) ; A. Hopf, iiber die Einleitung zum Timaios, Prog. Erlangen (1884) ; 
E. Schwartz, Timaeos' Geschichtswerk, in Hermes, Vol. XXXIV (1899), pp. 
481-493 ; J. Beloch, Die Okonomie der Geschichte des Timaios, in Jahrbiicher 
fUr classische Philologie, Vol. CXXIII (1881), pp. 697 sqq.; M. Biidinger, 
Universalhistorie im AUertum, pp. 51 sqq. 



CHAPTER XVI 

POLYBIUS 

The historian of History need hardly describe the works or 
narrate the lives of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, 
for their achievement is universally known, their works the common 
possession of the whole cultured world. But the case is different 
with Polybius. Art withheld from him the Hellenic heritage; 
he was no master of style; his history is not among the world's 
best literature. He is generally known to the modern reader as 
a name in footnotes. And yet in the long line of great historians 
he ranks among the first. He is par excellence the historian's 
historian of antiquity ,»and in our own day, when the scientific ideals 
for which he fought have at last won their way to power, his figure 
emerges from the comparatively obscure place to which his literary 
achievement entitles him, and reveals itself as a modern among 
antiques, critical but not blankly skeptical, working toward con- 
structive principles and conscious of the exacting standards of 
science. 

Polybius was a noble Greek, born at Megalopolis in Arcadia 
about 198 B.C. His father, Lycortas, was the friend and successor 
of Philopoemen, the patriot leader of the Achasan league — that last 
effort of united Hellas — and Polybius himself had hardly reached 
manhood before he was intrusted with high responsibility both as 
ambassador and magistrate. But the policy with which he was 
identified — that of strictly maintaining the formal alliance with 
Rome, neither yielding to encroachment nor furnishing pretexts for 
aggression — had little chance of success while the Roman armies 
were reducing the neighbors of Greece and Greek warring factions 
were inviting trouble. Pretexts for aggression can always be found, 
and accordingly, after the battle of Pydna in 168 B.C., Polybius was 
carried off to Rome, along with a thousand others, nominally as 
prisoners to await a trial which never came, but really as hostages 
to insure a freer hand for practical imperialism. Polybius himself 

191 



192 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

fared the best of these, for he was taken into the family of the 
victorious general, ^milius Paulus, and so stayed not only in Rome, 
but in company of the Scipios, in daily intercourse with the leading 
spirits of that masterful aristocracy into whose hands had fallen 
the destinies of the Mediterranean world. This favored position 
seems to have been won more by his personality than by his dis- 
tinguished ancestry or position in Greece, for he tells us with winning 
frankness how the young Scipio ^EmiUanus, the future conqueror of 
Africa, sought his friendship and became his pupil.^ 

Situated thus in the centre of things, Polybius became fired with 
the ambition to write the history of the tremendous epoch in which 
he was living. *' Can any one," he asks at the opening of his work, 
"be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, 
and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world 
was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city 
of Rome, and that too, within the period of not quite fifty-three 
years?" ^ For those who are not "so indiflferent or idle," Polybius 
left to the world a scientific achievement of undimmed and per- 
petual worth. Forty books of history carried the story from "the 
first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy," ^ 
in 264 B.C., through the varying fortunes of the Punic wars, down 
to the close of the history of Carthage and of Greece in 146 B.C. 
Of these forty books only the first five have come down to us entire, 
but lengthy portions of some of the others enable us to form a 
fairly clear idea of the work as a whole. Moreover, conscious 
of the intricacy of his subject, and of the difiiculty of handling 
intelligibly such a mass of detail, Polybius like a true school teacher 
furnishes us with explanatory notes and even, in the opening of the 
third book, with a sort of syllabus of the whole plan, in order to 
make sure that the reader shall not miss seeing the woods for the 

1 C/. The Histories of Polybius, Bk. XXXII, Chap. X. 

^ Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. I. H. Peter remarks that Polybius begins with Greek 
readers in mind but as his work progresses he turns to the Romans. {Wahrheit und 
Kunst, p. 263.) Note the frankness of this admission, in Bk. XXXII, Chap. VIII : 
"And if what I say appears incredible to any of my readers," let him remember that the 
Romans will read it and "no one . . . would voluntarily expose himself to certain dis- 
belief and contempt." The extent to which he could win thoughtful Romans may 
be measured by the fact that Brutus made excerpts from bir" during the campaign of 
Pharsalus. (Peter, ibid.) 

8 IbU., Bk. I, Chap. V. 



. POLYBIUS 193 

trees. These directions and hints are so thoroughly characteristic 
of the author, as we shall see later on, that we cannot do better 
than quote from them Polybius' own conception of his field of work. 
Apart from their value as guides, they at once afford a glimpse 
of the half-apologetic, half -proud attitude and wholly intimate 
relationship which Polybius assumes and establishes with the 
reader : 

" My History begins in the 140th Olympiad. The events from which it 
starts are these. In Greece, what is called the Social war, the first waged by 
Philip, son of Demetrius and father of Perseus, in league with the Achaeans 
against the ^tolians. In Asia, the war for the possession of Coele-Syria which 
Antiochus and Ptolemy Philopator carried on against each other. In Italy, 
Libya, and their neighbourhood, the conflict between Rome and Carthage, 
generally caUed the HannibaUan war. 

" My work thus begins where that of Aratus of Sicyon leaves off. Now 
up to this time the world's history had been, so to speak, a series of discon- 
nected transactions, as widely separated in their origin and results as in their 
localities. But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole : the 
affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the 
tendency of all is to unity. This is why I have fixed upon this era as the 
starting-point of my work. For it was their victory over the Carthaginians 
in this war, and their conviction that thereby the most difficult and most es- 
sential step towards universal empire had been taken, which encouraged the 
Romans for the first time to stretch out their hands upon the rest, and to cross 
with an army into Greece and Asia." * 

The real history, therefore, begins with the third book ; the first 
and second are but a laborious and massive prelude. The fifty- 
three years whose unparalleled achievements he proposes to chronicle 
are those from 220 to 168 B.C. That would bring the narrative 
down to the year in which the author himself was carried off to Rome, 
when the victory of Pydna ended forever any reasonable hope of 
the independence of Macedon or Greece. The frank subjectivity 
of Polybius' outlook ^ is reflected in this original plan. He proposed 
to stop the survey of politics where he himself had stopped; not 
consciously for that reason, but because from the home of the 
Scipios it had seemed as if the Roman conquest were over. He had 

' Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. III. (Shuckburgh's translation). 

2 "He is always on the stage himself, criticizing, expounding, emphasizing, making 
points, dotting the i's and crossing the t's, propounding and defending his personal 
views." J. B. Bury, op. cit., p. 211. 



194 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

become an imperialist and shared the imperiahstic conviction in an 
"inevitable destiny." It was from this point of view that he con- 
ceived his history. Fortuna, — part chance, part goddess, — had 
"made almost all the affairs of the world incUne in one direction, 
and forced them to converge upon one and the same point." So his 
history was to culminate in the unification of the Mediterranean 
world. He knew that intrigue and hot revolt still broke out in 
the subdued territories but such things, properly reduced in size by 
distance, are always to be expected on the verge of the imperialist's 
perspective. Later, however, Polybius saw that the task of imperial- 
ism was not completed but only begun by its conquests, and so he 
carried his narrative down to include the burning of Carthage 
and the sack of Corinth — at both which events he was present.^ 
The reason which Polybius gives for adding this later survey 
is interesting and important. It furnishes us with the clue for his 
conception of the mission of the historian. We may as well quote 
him in his own downright way. It is clear enough, he says, that 
in the fifty- three years "the Roman power had arrived at its con- 
summation," and that the acknowledgment of her supremacy 
had been extorted from all, and her commands obeyed : 

"But in truth, judgments of either side founded on the bare facts of success 
or failure in the field are by no means final. It has often happened that what 
seemed the most signal successes have, from ill management, brought the most 
crushing disasters in their train; while not unfrequently the most terrible 
calamities, sustained with spirit, have been turned to actual advantage. I 
am bound, therefore, to add to my statement of facts a discussion on the sub- 
sequent policy of the conquerors, and their administration of their universal 
dominion : and again on the various feelings and opinions entertained by other 
nations towards their rulers. And I must also describe the tastes and aims of 
the several nations, whether in their private Uves or public poUcy. The present 
generation will learn from this whether they should shun or seek the rule of 
Rome; and future generations will be taught whether to praise and imitate, 
or to decry it." * 

^ His presence at the sack of Corinth has been disputed. In any case, his account 
has survived in such poor fragments that the question is of secondary importance. 
He was evidently there, or near there, shortly afterwards. Cf. The Histories of Polyb- 
ius, Bk. XXXIX, Chap. XIII. "I saw with my own eyes pictures thrown on the 
ground and soldiers playing dice on them." 

»/WJ., Bk. Ill, Chap. IV. 



POLYBIUS 195 

Here we come upon the practical aim of all Polybius' work — 
the pragmatic character of it, which he insists upon, time and 
again. 'History was to him no mere antiquarianism. He is a 
practical politician, and history is simply past politics. It is 
justified by its utiHty ; it is philosophy teaching by experience.^ A 
knowledge of history, he says in another place, is no mere graceful 
accomphshment, but absolutely essential as a guide to action. It 
is only history which can supply the statesman with precedents. 
The present offers no such chances as the past for judging the 
relative forces of circumstances or the motives of men : • 

" In the case of contemporaries, it is difficult to obtain an insight into their 
purposes; because, as their words and actions are dictated by a desire of ac- 
commodating themselves to the necessity of the hour, and of keeping up appear- 
ances, the truth is too often obscured. Whereas the transactions of the past 
admit of being tested by naked fact ; and accordingly display without disguise 
the motives and purposes of the several persons engaged; and teach us from 
what sort of people to expect favour, active kindness, and assistance, or the 
reverse. They give us also many opportunities of distinguishing who would 
be likely to pity us, feel indignation at our wrongs, and defend our cause, — a 
power that contributes very greatly to national as well as individual security. 
Neither the writer nor the reader of history, therefore, should confine his atten- 
tion to a bare statement of facts : he must take into account all that preceded, 
accompanied, or followed them. For if you take from history aU explanation 
of cause, principle, and motive, and of the adaptation of the means to the end, 
what is left is a mere panorama without being instructive ; and, though it may 
please for the moment, has no abiding value."* 

The key-note of this is that history must "instruct." It is no 
mean task that it has in hand ; the lesson which the tutor of Scipio 
Africanus would draw from it is nothing less than a science of politics. 
The story of Hannibal's march upon Rome and of the firmness of the 
Romans in the crisis is told with equal and generous admiration for 
both sides, "not . . . .for the sake of making a panegyric on 
either Romans or Carthaginians, . . . but for the sake of those 
who are in office among the one or the other people, or who are 
in future times to direct the affairs of any state whatever ; that by 

^ This time-worn phrase is already found in Ars Rhetorica (Chap. XI, Sect. 2), 
attributed to Dionysius of Halicamassus, in a paraphrase of Thucydides, Bk. I, Chap. 
XXII. 

* The Histories of Polybius, Bk. Ill, Chap. XXXI. 



196 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

the memory, or actual contemplation, of exploits such as these 
they may be inspired with emulation." ^ ^Perhaps the clearest 
statement of this conviction of Polybius that history is philosophy 
teaching by experience, — a conviction stated many times over, 
— is his comment on the narrative of the defeat of Regulus in the 
first Punic war : 

"I record these things in the hope of benefiting my readers. There are 
two roads to reformation for mankind — one through misfortunes of their 
own, the other through those of others : the former is the most unmistakable, 
the latter the less painful. One should never therefore voluntarily choose the 
former, for it makes reformation a matter of great difl&culty and danger ; but 
we should always look out for the latter, for thereby we can without hurt to 
ourselves gain a clear view of the best course to pursue. It is this which forces 
us to consider that the knowledge gained from the study of true history is the 
best of all educations for practical life. For it is history, and history alone, 
which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and 
prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of 
affairs." * 

It must be admitted that such a "pragmatic" point of view is 
not altogether reassuring. A historian who is mainly intent on 
the lessons history supplies would be given short shrift today in 
the courts of historical criticism. But Polybius was saved as a 
historian by his very commonplaceness as a philosopher. He never 
really got the upper hand of the facts. He does not even achieve 
a systematic conception of cause and effect, so necessary to the 
brilliant distortions of philosophers. He talks about causes, and 
allows himself so much as two chapters in one place to point out 
that a "cause" and a "pretext" are not the same thing.^ But he 
gets little farther than a negative criticism of his predecessor, Fabius 
Pictor, who had not even seen this. In spite of the best pedagogical 
intentions, Polybius did not lose sight of actuaUties in the search 
for final causes. He is too matter-of-fact to leave the facts. His 
intensely practical outlook makes him incapable of sympathy with 
abstractions and keeps him down to the task of securing accurate 
and full data in the field of realities — which is the first and indis- 

1 The Histories of Polybius, Bk. IX, Chap. IX. 

2 Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XXXV. 

3 Cf. ibid., Bk. Ill, Chap. III. F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 57, 
compares the looseness of terms of Thucydides (Bk. I, Chap. XXIII). 



POLYBIUS 197 

pensable qualification for the historian. Polybius is intent upon 
supplying statesmen with lessons from experience, not with theories 
of what might have happened. In a discussion of the constitution 
of Sparta he says that it would not be fair to class the Republic of 
Plato "which is spoken of in high terms by some philosophers" 
among the systems which have actually been tried out : 

" For just as we refuse admission to the athletic contests to those actors or 
athletes who have not acquired a recognized position or trained for them, so 
we ought not to admit this Platonic constitution to the contest for the prize 
of merit unless it can first point to some genuine and practical achievement. 
Up to this time the notion of bringing it into comparison with the constitutions 
of Sparta, Rome and Carthage would be like putting up a statue to compare 
with living and breathing men. Even if the statue were faultless in point of 
art, the comparison of the lifeless with the living would naturally leave an im- 
pression of imperfection and incongruity upon the minds of the spectators." ^ 

This sounds less Greek than Roman. But it also reassures us 
that the author is not the man to be drawn into the realm of theory 
so long as the world is full of things for him to study. He wastes 
no time over "final causes," in spite of a constant desire to bring 
up the question.^ Indeed his own philosophy of history is not 
quite settled. He begins by attributing to Fortune the great drift 
of events which resulted in the imperial unity ; but while paying a 
formal tribute to the goddess of luck, he in practice reserves her 
for the more unexpected turns of affairs, the sudden surprises and 
the inexplicable.^ "It was not by mere chance or without knowing 
what they were doing that the Romans struck their bold stroke for 
universal supremacy and dominion, and justified their boldness by 
its success. No : it was the natural result of discipline gained in 
the stem school of difficulty and danger." ^ The theology of 
Fortune shares the fate of all the other abstractions at the hands 
of Polybius. He is not interested in it, but in the facts. 

In keeping with this attitude was the method of work. Polybius 
was a student rather than a scholar; a student of men and the 

» The Histories of Polybius, Bk. VI, Chap. XLVH. 
« Cf. ibid., Bk. I, Chaps. LXIII-LXIV; Bk. Ill, Chaps. VII-IX, etc. 
» Cf. ibid., Bk. XXIX, Chaps. XXI-XXII. 

* Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. LXIII. Cf. ibid., Bk. XXXVII, Chap. IX, for Polybius' 
ideas on Providence. 



198 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

world around rather than of books. To be sure he spared himself no 
pains in his investigations, and that meant much scholarly research ; 
but he always regarded that as of secondary importance compared 
with a first-hand knowledge of how things had been and were being 
done. If anything could shock the complacency of the modern 
research-historian who sees the world so often through the barred 
windows of an alcove in the archives, it is that attack upon Timaeus, 
the learned antiquarian, which fills most of the twelfth book, and to 
which we shall revert later. Polybius holds Timaeus up to scorn, 
because ''having stayed quietly at Athens for about fifty years, 
during which [time] he devoted himself to the study of written 
history, he imagined that he was in possession of the most important 
means of writing it." ^ One must have served in war to know how 
to describe it accurately and well; one must have watched the 
political movements of one's own day to be able to handle those 
of the past. These quaUfications Polybius had in a superlative 
degree. Of a good deal of his story he had been "an eye-witness, 
... in some cases one of the actors, and in others the chief actor." ^ 
He was present at the last great tragic moment of Carthage; it 
was to him that Scipio turned to confide his presentiment that Rome 
would some day suffer the same fate.^ He knew not only Romans 
and Greeks but leaders on all sides, Massanissa, for example, and 
Carthaginians themselves.* Then, instead of staying comfortably 
in Rome, he set out, like a Herodotus of the West, to see the new 
world which was just opening up to civilization. It was a scientific 
exploration. He tells us that he confronted "the dangers and 
fatigues of my travels in Libya, Iberia and Gaul, as well as of the 
sea which washes the western coast of these countries, that I might 
correct the imperfect knowledge of former writers. . . ." ^ His ex- 
perience leads him to a wholesale distrust of former geographers ; but 
then, as he adds, none of them enjoyed the opportunities for finding 
out about the world, which the pax Romana now afforded. His 
curiosity was insatiable. He crossed, himself, the pass by which 
Hannibal made the Alps ; at the other end of Italy he deciphered 
Hannibal's inscription on a pillar on a promontory of Brutium in 

1 The Histories of Polybius, Bk. XII, Chap. XXV, Sect d. 

« Ibid., Bk. Ill, Chap. IV. » Cf. ibid., Bk. XXXIX, Chap. V. 

* C/. ibid.y Bk. IX, Chap. XXV. ^ Ibid., Bk. m, Chap. LIX. 



POLYBIUS 199 

order to establish the distribution of the Carthaginian forces. He 
mapped out cities, examined records,^ transcribed treaties,^ and 
studied earlier historians. But he seldom found an authority 
with whom he did not become impatient, and perhaps his most 
striking personal note is his persistent criticism and distrust of 
historians and his frequent disgust with them. It was impossible 
for one of his direct business-like temperament to accept the 
rhetorical historians of his day, but in his scorn of rhetoric and his 
impatience of bookishness, he went so far as to miss the real achieve- 
ments of his predecessors. 

This attitude, moreover, had a personal significance ; it reflects 
the weak side of Polybius. For, in spite of all his prodigious labor, 
he never learned how to tell his story effectively. He was no artist. 
He had none of the easy grace of Herodotus nor the masterful touch 
of Thucydides. It is rather characteristic of him, by the way, 
that he never referred to the former and mentioned the latter only 
in a casual remark. He had nothing to learn ; chose to work out 
his own salvation, — and almost failed to win it. For he could 
not weave the intricate and elaborate pattern of world history with- 
out frequently tangling the threads in the effort not to lose them. 
He knew this as well as we do, and time and again came into the 
narrative himself with digressions which are excuses and explana- 
tions.^ This is what gives that intimate, personal character to his 
history, which is so un-antique. Herodotus swung into his theme 
with the abandon of one who knows how to tell a great story well. 
Thucydides worked like a dramatist, objectively, submitting only 
the finished product to the audience. Neither of them invited you 
into his workshop or interrupted a war to discuss scientific methods. 
But Polybius cannot keep himself out of the narrative, and once 
in it, he gives free rein to his feelings as well as his views. He con- 
sistently loses his temper when he finds things wrong in his sources, 

1 Cf. the chance remark in ihid., Bk. XVI, Chap. XV, that a document at Rhodes 
bears out his account. 

2 Cf. ihid., Bk. Ill, Chaps. XXII sqq. 

' The following passages are especially valuable for their comments upon style 
and method of handling: Ibid., Bk. II, Chap. LVI; Bk. Ill, Chaps. LVII-LIX; Bk. 
IX, Chap. I ; Bk. XV, Chap. XXXVI ; Bk. XVI, Chap. XVII ; Bk. XXXVII, Chap. 
IV; Bk. XXXIX, Chap. I. 

Perhaps the most thoroughly apologetic is his opening of the thirty-ninth book. 



200 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

and once heated, he becomes garrulous. Untrained — for a Greek — 
in Hterature, a man of action who had turned school-teacher, he faces 
his subject like a problem and presents his research like solutions. 
He lectures his contemporaries and berates his predecessors^ when 
they fail to come up to his standard — which is generally the case. 
Then he apologizes for the digression and settles down to a little 
more narrative. But the digressions are much more than apologies ; 
for, after all, Polybius had thought deeply on his own task. They 
rise to the dignity of a treatise upon history, the first and the noblest 
statement of scientific ideals for the historian until the days of 
Ranke. Indeed, it is these excursus rather than his great theme 
which give to Polybius so high a place in the history of History. 
How incredible it would have seemed to him that any one should 
read his history for the sake of its asides instead of for the compelling 
interest of the theme ! Yet there are some to whom even the rise 
of the Roman Empire is of less significance than the rise of the 
scientific method. After all, the one is in the past, its potentiahties 
are well-nigh spent; the other is of the future and all time, and 
capable of untold possibilities. 

This treatise is scattered throughout the whole history as we 
have indicated and indeed is exemplified in the structure and method 
of work. Polybius demands the truth which is " the eye of History," 
and insists that the historian must give up all partisanship, all 
personal bias, and making himself a judge, proceed to master the 
facts — as they actually were. " Directly a man assumes the moral 
attitude of a historian he ought to forget all considerations," such 
as love of one's friends, hatred of one's enemies. ... He must 
sometimes praise enemies and blame friends. "For as a living 
creature is rendered wholly useless if deprived of its eyes, so if you 
take truth from History, what is left but an idle unprofitable tale? "^ 
These are noble words, worthy to be held in everlasting memory. 
Unfortunately they were almost never heard and — in spite of good 
intentions — not applied even by those who studied Polybius — 
Cicero, for instance. Polybius does not say that historians are 
given to conscious falsification, — though he does strike that note 
at times, — but he is keenly alive to the bias that partisanship 

1 Cf. J. B. Bury, op. cU., Lect. VI. 

2 The Histories of Polybius, Bk. I, Chap. XIV. Cf. also Bk. XII, Chap. XH. 



POLYBIUS 20I 

is sure to give to a narrative even in honest hands. "I would beg 
my own readers, whether of my own or future generations, if I am 
ever detected in making a deUberate misstatement, and disregarding 
truth in any part of my history, to criticize me unmercifully ; but if I 
do so from lack of information, to make allowances : and I ask it for 
myself more than others, owing to the size of my history and the 
extent of ground covered. . . ." ^ This strain runs all through 
the work, but it is especially concentrated in the famous twelfth book 
in which Polybius attacks his predecessor Timaeus. This digression 
comes near to being a treatise in itself. The student of history who 
fails to be stirred by it — considering its time and circumstances — 
has little to hope from anything that follows in this survey. 

Polybius believed in the pragmatic character of the historian's 
ofl&ce. History must edify, must be of use. But it loses its pragma- 
tism if it is not true; it is only an "idle tale." And this is the 
pragmatic test of his own work. We are not much edified by the 
details of the wars in Greece. No one is now likely to become 
excited over the institutions of the Locrians or the policy of Diaeus. 
But as long as history endures the ideals of Polybius will be an 
inspiration and a guide. 

1 Ibid., Bk. XVI, Chap. XX. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

G. W. Botsford and E. G. Sihler in Hellenic Civilization (1915), Chap. 
XVIII, Sect. D {Historical Criticism), give appropriate extracts and a good 
bibliography, to which reference may be made for intensive study. For the 
text of Polybius see the edition by T. Biittner-Wobst (5 vols., ist and 2d ed., 
Teubner, 1889-1905). The best English translation is by E. S. Shuckburgh, 
The Histories of Polybius (2 vols., 1889). This translation has been used in 
the text. The Loeb Classical Library has announced a translation of 
Polybius, by W. R. Paton, for the year 1920. J. B. Bury in The Ancient 
Greek Historians (1909), (Lect. VI, pp. 191-220) is rather hard on Polybius; 
compare the treatment by A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la litterature grecque, 
(5 vols., 2d ed., 1896-1899; 3d ed., Vols. I-III, 1910-1914) ; (2d ed.), Vol. 
V, pp. 260-295. 



CHAPTER XVII 

LATER GREEK HISTORIANS 

Although Polybius may justly rank as the last of the great Greek 
historians, his name is by no means the last in Greek historiogra- 
phy. There were many historians, of varying degrees of impor- 
tance, among those Greek scholars who became the teachers of the 
Roman world, and while individually their achievement is perhaps 
not such as to warrant any detailed examination of it here, yet, 
taken as a whole, it ofifers some striking generalizations. 

In the first place the incentive to history-writing was no longer 
connected with that first stimulus which produced it, patriotism 
or national sentiment. The transplanted scholar, living an exile 
in foreign lands, could hardly take his own antiquity along; and 
if he did, few would care to know about it. On the other hand he 
could not acquire the antiquities of the country of his residence 
with the same sentimental appreciation of their bearing upon 
history as if he had been born to their inheritance. The result 
was a certain detachment, upon the part of later Greek scholars, 
which in some cases seems to have made for indifference as to those 
movements of cause and effect that so intrigued the keen intelligence 
of Polybius and left them rather dilettanti antiquarians, and on 
the other hand made for an enlargement of view that carried the 
better minds beyond the narrow confines of purely Roman pa- 
triotism and gave them a glimpse of world history. 

It is hard to say why the obvious advantages of such a detached 
position were not exploited more. The Hellenistic Greek could 
view many of the historical problems of antiquity with much the 
same kind of aloofness as that which the modern scholar brings to 
the study of the Middle Ages. One might even expect that the 
economic stimulus of earning a living by one's wits would have 
stirred the Greek intellectuals, who graced the households of the 
masters of the world as slaves, freedmen or dependents, to notable 

202 



LATER GREEK HISTORIANS 203 

achievement in that kind of research which leads to systematic 
results along scientific lines. But rhetoric on the one hand, and 
philosophy on the other proved to be the winning rivals. 

Mention of Greek philosophy in this connection recalls the fact 
that we have hardly spoken of it before. Rhetoric and the influence 
of Isocrates have come very largely to the fore ; but what of the 
influence of philosophy upon Greek historiography? Plato has 
so far escaped any but casual mention, and Aristotle has come 
within our survey only in a footnote ! Yet the greatest creations 
of Greek thought could not but affect the outlook of historians, 
even if they contributed httle directly. Truth was an ideal of 
philosophy as of history, and in the recognition of social virtues 
as historic forces, or even in the whole pragmatic quality of such a 
work as that of Polybius, there may be as much an index of Stoic 
influence upon the writer's trend of thought as of his direct power 
of observation.^ The lessons which history supplies to one trained 
in the principles of such a philosophy are not the same as those 
which it would bring to a Herodotus. 

To follow these suggestions would lead one into intricate fields 
of scholarship, far beyond our bounds. The history of the philos- 
ophy of Greek historiography may best be left for the specialist. 
This, of course, implies that the contribution of philosophy to 
history was a limited one. For while it offered points of view to 
historians, it failed to provide that apparatus of criticism which 
is the basis of science. Aristotle, it is true, made a beginning ; but 
the influence of Plato told in the other direction. Although it was 
a great thing to have justified the supremacy of reason, as he did, 
and to have insisted upon the identity of truth and good, the 
abstract tendency of his speculation unified that assemblage of 
data, which is the investigator's universe, by means of the most 
unhistorical fine of thought imaginable, his theory of ideas. Meta- 
physics and history have not much in common. 

But the interest of thinkers in ideas rather than in facts was less 
responsible for the limited progress of antique historiography than 
the failure to recognize the value of mechanism. There is a striking 

1 An excellent short account of this subject is to be found in H. Peter, Wahrheit 
und Kunst, Chap. VII (Die Stoa, Polybios, Poseidonios und Strahon).'^ 



204 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

passage in Phcedrus in which, according to Plato, Socrates laments 
the passing of that time when the only known facts about the past 
were those treasured in memory and the coming of that degenerate 
age when people no longer bother remembering things they can 
read in books.^ He deprecates above all the invention of writing. 
ReUance on such devices lessens the capacities of the user for dis- 
tinguishing truth from its semblance. It is a specious argument; 
and one might think that his pupil Plato, recording it — in writing — 
might do so with a sense of the humor of the situation. But there 
is no sign of it. For, as a matter of fact, this objection of Socrates 
to alphabets was but a single expression of something reaching 
deeply through the whole trend of Plato's mind. That mind was 
fundamentally poetic. It recoiled against mechanism tempera- 
mentally. It felt instinctively that making black marks on papy- 
rus from Egypt or skins from Asia — those skins the merchants of 
Pergamum later made into parchments — is an inferior operation to 
reciting an epic. It is the same kind of protest that we have today 
on the part of those who prefer hand labor to machinery. Socrates, 
one supposes, would have preferred to tell the time by a guess at 
the lengthening shadow on the square rather than by using a 
watch. By ignoring inventions one keeps "close to nature." 

This is an attitude to be found through the whole history of 
culture. Its most earnest advocates have been the artists, of every 
kind of expression, impatient of anything interposed between 
nature and the individual. It partly springs from the concen- 
tration of a creator on his creation — that concentration which is 
joy, — leaving him relatively indifferent as to its preservation. 
Idealism, drawn to this romantic sentiment, has often denied itself 
the means of achievement, by holding aloof from the processes by 
which ideas are realized. It is curious how short-sighted it has 
been. For, in the larger view, mechanism itself is an art-creation. 
The invention of an alphabet is a work of art to rank beside poetry. 
In its use it is part of the clothing of thought, like the words them- 
selves ; and shares the immortahty which it assures. Even machin- 
ery, which supplants the motions of the hand of the worker, 
incorporates thought in its materials, just as marble bears the 
impress of a sculptor's imagination or the massing of pigment on 

* Phcedrus, 274-275 D. 



LATER GREEK HISTORIANS 205 

a painter's canvas preserves the suggestion of nature. Being a 
social rather than an individual creation, however, the appreciation 
of it is more difficult. 

Greek philosophy missed the great point that the power of ideas 
works itself out in a grimy world, the world of daily life. History 
depends upon that mechanism which transfers thought from 
brains to material substances, and so enables thought to endure 
while thinkers come and go. It is rather sobering to recall how 
much depends upon the substance. We know, for instance, that 
the burning of the library at Alexandria blotted out for all time 
much of the culture of that distant antiquity which it had gathered 
in the papyri on its shelves. We know, as well, that the last 
classics of Greece and Rome perished in the mouldy rolls of papyrus 
which could not last in the climate of the northern Mediterranean. 
The book trade of the ancients was careless of the future, — as ours 
is today. But had it not been for papyrus rolls dealt in by those 
astute traders who brought their goods to the wharves of the 
Peiraeus and Ostia, it is doubtful if the Uterature of classic Greece 
and Rome would have been produced at all. Had there been 
nothing better than clay tablets to scratch, how would the Augustan 
age have achieved what it did ? Imagine Polybius or Livy accumu- 
lating the mud cylinders necessary for their histories ! Or, to bring 
the matter down to our own time, what would our modern litera- 
ture and journalism amount to if the art of making paper had not 
been brought to Europe by the Arabs? A printing press without 
paper is unthinkable ; and modern literature cannot exist without 
them both. We need a Sartor Resartus in the history of literature 
to show us how naked and helplessly limited is thought except 
when provided with mechanism. 

There have been two great creative epochs in the history of our 
civilization ; that of ancient Greece and that of today. The one pro- 
duced critical thought ; the other japplied it to invent machines. Be- 
side these two contributions to secular society, all others rank as mi- 
nor. The one stirred into activity that critical intelligence, upon 
which rests our whole apparatus of knowledge ; the other made 
nature our ally not merely by applying its power to do our work, 
but also by supplying the means for extending knowledge itself, al- 
most to the infinite. And the point to which this history returns 



2o6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

again and again, is that even the genius of a Plato could hardly 
anticipate the merest fraction of the results to be obtained by the 
slow, minute processes of the mechanism of science. 

It is perhaps fortunate for us that we are spared the temptation 
of tracing these suggestions in subsequent Hellenic historians, 
by the fragmentary character of the hterary remains of most of 
those who might offer themselves for such a study. We shall have 
it before us, however, as we turn to Rome. It remains now for us 
merely to pass in rapid review the work of the more outstanding 
figures among those gifted Greeks who supplied the cultured world 
of their time with the kind of histories it demanded 

The history of Polybius was continued by the Stoic Posidonius, 
who applied himself to the task with somewhat the same apprecia- 
tion of the distortions of narrative due to rhetorical adornment as 
Polybius himself. He had also, Hke Polybius, travelled widely on 
the outskirts of the known world, from Spain to Rhodes and Syria 
and wrote voluminously on all kinds of topics. His Geography 
and his History are the only works of interest here. The latter 
was begun in 74 B.C. and continued the universal history of Polyb- 
ius, in fifty-two books, from 144 B.C. to the Dictatorship of Sulla 
in 82 B.C. It was a notable performance, and although Posidonius 
does not belong with the rhetoricians, but in the succession of 
Timaeus and Polybius, Cicero deferred to him as to a master of 
style, when trying himself to write the account of his own consulate 
in Greek. The modern critic has not less praise for this Stoic his- 
torian, his learning, and his critical capacity.^ 

Strabo (c. 64 B.C.-19 a.d.), the great geographer was also a 
continuator of Polybius, and wrote as well some Historical Memoirs 
which included a treatment of the deeds of Alexander. The 
Geography, too, had a historical introduction covering the history 
of geography and the work of geographers to his own day, — almost 
our only source for such important figures as Eratosthenes. More- 
over, historians are so much in evidence as authorities in the Geog- 
raphy that it may almost be said to embody the descriptive phase 
of antique historiography, that phase so evident in the excursus of 

^ Cf. Cicero, Epistularum Ad Auicum Liber Secundus, Letter I, Sects. 1 and 2 ; 
H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 265-270. 



LATER GREEK HISTORIANS 207 

Herodotus. But Strabo has a further interest for us. His method, 
in line with the traditions we have just seen maintained by Posi- 
donius, was to cite largely from his authorities and so preserve 
fragments of them for his less scholarly readers and, in part, for 
us. A travelled Greek, he also knew Rome, and is an outstanding 
example of those "philosophers," — for so he is termed by Plutarch, 
— who held to the saner lines of criticism and respected facts. 
He was more a scholar than a historian, as his predilection for 
geography indicates. The events of history require an added 
dimension. It is easier to describe the world in space than in 
time,^ and for that great synthesis which recreates in intelligence 
the happenings of chance he lacked the full stature of genius. On 
the other hand it was to his credit that he did not try to reach that 
synthesis by the facile use of words and phrases, to which a rhetori- 
cian would have yielded. 

It was just this synthesis, in the widest possible sense, which 
Diodorus Siculus (c. 80-29 B.C.), Strabo's older contemporary, had 
tried to reach in his general history (Bibliotheca Historica) in forty 
books; tried and failed, for the chief value of his work to us is 
in the fragments of sources which he built into it, not the bold uni- 
fying conception of which he was chiefly proud. He began with the 
mythical accounts of ancient Egypt and the Orient, and carried 
the story of Greece and Sicily down to the close. But — fortu- 
nately for the preservation of his sources — he did not see the 
interconnection of events and simply made a sort of world-chronicle 
out of a series of chronicles of different countries, cutting and 
trimming the authorities to meet the exigencies, but still leaving 
them to substantiate the narrative. To this clumsy, but imposing, 
monument of erudition Diodorus added some of the unrealities of 
rhetoric ; and it is hardly to be wondered at if he failed to receive 
the attention of those of his day for whom he wrote. It was only 
later, when Christian scholars in the third century began to look 

^ In this connection mention should be made of those Greek chronographers 
who drew together comparative lists of events in world chronicles. The basis of chro- 
nology, laid by Eratosthenes of Alexandria in the third century B.C., was built upon by 
ApoUodorus of Athens, whose four books of chronicles reached down to 119 B.C. Then 
Castor of Rhodes gathered the threads together into a synchronistic table or "canon," 
ending with the year 6i b.c. Castor's chronicle was destined to prove of great impor- 
tance later to the Christian chronologists. He is plentifully in evidence in Eusebius. 



2o8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

back across the pagan past for an account of the whole world, and 
not of Rome merely, that Diodorus proved to be of enough impor- 
tance to secure the preservation of part of his world history. 

It was in the line of these great world histories that Nicholas of 
Damascus wrote the one hundred forty-four books of universal his- 
tory to which reference has been made above in the chapter on Jose- 
phus. The favorite of Herod the Great knew how to win as well 
the favor of Augustus, and his detailed account of contemporary 
events was apparently not lacking in rhetorical polish. But his 
work was more a compilation, like that of Diodorus, than an in- 
dependent history. 

By a strange coincidence it was the city of Herodotus which 
produced the historian who most vitiated the scientific possibilities 
of this kind of scholarship by acceptance of the standards of rhetoric. 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, born about the middle of the first 
century B.C., came to Rome in the year 30 B.C., and as he proudly 
relates in the introduction to his Archceologia spent twenty- two 
years in preparation for his great work, which was published 
in the year 7 a.d. He moved in the best circles of Rome, and it 
was his ambition to rival Livy by the wealth of his detailed in- 
formation concerning the Roman antiquities. In addition, he 
tried to satisfy Greek pride by making much of the Greek origins 
of Rome. Two such divergent purposes could be welded into a 
single history only by the greatest creative capacity upon the part 
of the historian ; and instead of this, Dionysius brought a mediocre 
talent and the devices of rhetoric. Even these devices were not 
all his own; for he embodied expressions from the Greek classics, 
where they could aptly apply to his narrative, seeking effect 
above all, and, as is generally the case in such instance, failing to 
achieve it. 

Under the Roman Empire, Greek scholarship continued at its 
various tasks ; and after the golden age of Latin literature was over, 
Greek became once more, under the Antonines, the medium for 
culture. Into the details of this story we shall not enter ; but we 
should at least recall in passing the lasting importance to history 
of Plutarch's Lives. Few books have done more to determine 
the reputation of historical characters for subsequent ages. The 



LATER GREEK HISTORIANS 209 

forty-six Parallel Lives are arranged in pairs, mainly Roman and 
Greek, and the personalities they depict are typical of the times 
and customs of their environment or of their own professions 
and careers. There are generals and statesmen, patriots and law- 
givers; a gallery of the great figures whose names were already 
more or less legendary and who now became fixed in the imagination 
of the world as real, living characters. Plutarch was a native of 
Boeotia, and, although he travelled widely, he seems to have writ- 
ten his biographies after his return to the little town of Chaeronea 
where he was born. It is a striking fact that, writing as he does 
in this isolated village, he shows a larger and more catholic mind 
than his brilliant contemporary, Tacitus, writing at Rome. This 
is a point to which we shall revert later, when we come to see the 
influences which made for provincialism at Rome under the Caesars ; 
but it is well to recognize here that in Plutarch we have a genuine 
"historian" in the first sense of the word, an inquirer on the paths 
of truth, — as interested in comparative religion as in morals, and 
lacking only in the social and political interests which bind these 
elements of personality and mystery into the complex processes of 
society, and so make history. 

Finally, passing by such notable figures as Appian of Alexandria, 
of whose accounts of the various provinces of the Empire in twenty- 
four books, written under Trajan and Hadrian, almost the half 
has been preserved, or Arrian of Bithynia, the favorite of Hadrian 
and the Antonines, the worthy disciple of Epictetus and historian 
of the Persian wars, we come to the last of the list in Cassius Die 
Coccejanus, the historian of Rome, of the third century. He was 
born in Nicasa in Bithynia about 155 a.d., and passed a long 
life in high offices of state, consul, proconsul of Africa, legate to 
Dalmatia and Pannonia. He died about the year 235. His 
history of Rome, in eighty books, was divided into decades after 
the manner in which Livy's was then preserved, and it stretched 
over the whole field from the arrival of ^neas in Italy to the 
reign of Alexander Severus. It was a work of long researches, 
ten years spent in collecting the materials, twelve more in com- 
position, and was to the Greek-speaking East much what Livy was 
to the Latin West.^ It expounded the great theme of Roman 

^ H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunsi, p. 396. 



2IO INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

history in the spirit of a Roman official. At the close, therefore, 
Greek historiography fused and lost itself in that theme of empire 
which was to perpetuate its outlook, however changed and dimmed, 
in a new state creation at Byzantium. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The fragments of Posidonius are to be found in C. MiiUer, Fragmenta 
Historicorum Grcecorum (5 vols., 1841-1873), Vol. Ill, pp. 245-296. The 
most recent Teubner text of Strabo's Geographica is that of A. Meineke (3 vols., 
1904-1909). The translation in the Loeb Classical Library is by H. L. lones 
(8 vols., Vol. I, 191 7). There is an edition of Diodorus Siculus by F. Vogel 
and C. T. Fischer (5 vols., Teubner, 1 888-1 906) ; a translation by J. Fox has 
been promised by the Loeb Classical Library. The fragments of Nicholas of 
Damascus are preserved in C. MiiUer, Fragmenta Historicorum Grcecorum, 
Vol. Ill, pp. 343-464 ; Vol. IV, pp. 661-668, and in L. Dindorf, Historici Graci 
Minores (2 vols., t8'7o-i87i). Vol. I, pp. 1-153. The text of Dionysius of 
Hahcarnassus has been edited by C. Jacoby, H. Usener and L. Radermacher 
(6 vols., Teubner, 1885-1905) ; a translation of Dionysius' treatise, On Literary 
Composition, has been made by W. R. Roberts (1910). 

There are editions of Plutarch's Vitae Parallelae by C. Sintenis (4 vols., 
1839-1846 ; 5 vols., Teubner, 1873-1875) and by C. Lindskog and K. Ziegler 
(Teubner, Vols. I-III, 1914-1915). The "Dryden Plutarch" revised by A. H. 
Clough is the version used in Everyman's Library (3 vols., 1910). There is 
also the translation of Plutarch's works by W. Goodwin and A. H. Clough 
(10 vols., 1914-1921). Naturally there is more literature on Plutarch than can 
be noted here. 

The Teubner editions of Appian are by I. Bekker (2 vols., 1852-1853) and 
L. Mendelssohn (2 vols., 1879-1881) ; there is a partial edition by P. Viereck 
(Vol. II, 1905). Translations of the text are by J. L. Strachan-Davidson, 
Appian' s Civil Wars (Bk. I, 1902) and by H. White, Appian' s Roman History, 
in the Loeb Classical Library (4 vols., 1912-1913). 

For the text of Arrian there is the edition by A. G. Rocs (ed. maior, Vol. I, 
1907). There is a translation, The Anabasis of Alexander and Indica, by E. J. 
Chinnock (1893). The text of Dio Cassius is edited by J. Melber (2 vols., 
Teubner, 1890-1894) and by U. P. Boissevain (3 vols., 1895-1901). A lengthy 
list of pubhcations on Dio accompanies H. B. Foster's translation, Dio's Rome; 
an Historical Narrative . . . (6 vols., 1905-1906), which formed the basis for 
the edition by E. Gary in the Loeb Classical Library (9 vols., Vols. I-VI, 
I9I4-I9I7). 



SECTION IV 
ROMAN fflSTORY 

CHAPTER XVIII 
HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 

If politics be the main theme of history in the antique world, 
it might seem reasonable to look for the greatest historians among 
the people who achieved the greatest political creation, the Romans. 
But although Rome furnished the lesson in practical statesmanship, 
both for antiquity and for succeeding ages, its achievement in 
history-writing is, upon the whole, poor and disappointing. It was 
a Greek, Polybius, who, as we have seen, wrote in the city of the 
Scipios the story of the emergence of the Latin people upon the 
theatre of world empire. Although Sallust, Livy and Tacitus 
rise to the height of national monuments, — Tacitus even higher 
still, — yet the two outstanding figures of Roman literature, through- 
out the Middle Ages as in Modern Times, are Vergil, the epic poet, 
and Cicero, the philosophic orator. There is a real significance 
in this ; for in them, rather than in the historians, are typified the 
interests and attitudes of the intellectual Romans themselves, — 
in them and in that other still greater creation of the Latin genius, 
the Roman law. The extent of the failure of the Romans in history- 
writing, when they had a theme the like of which had never been 
even dreamed of in the world before, is obscured by the individual 
genius of Tacitus. But from his time, — excepting Suetonius, who 
was partly contemporary, — - to the fall of the empire at the end of 
the fourth century, when a simple, straightforward soldier, Ammi- 
anus Marcelhnus, told of the wars on the frontier and the troubles 
at home, there "was not one author of talent to preserve in Latin 
the memory of the events that stirred the world of that period ; 
but it was a Bithynian . . . , Dion Cassius of Nicaea, who, under 
the Severi, narrated the history of the Roman people."* 

1 F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, p. 7, where the debt of 
Rome to the Orient is brilliantly summarized. 

211 



212 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Our sense of loss is probably lessened by the poor consolation 
that had a second Tacitus appeared and devoted himself to the 
larger theme disclosed by the passing centuries, he could hardly 
have succeeded, however great his genius, in dealing alone with so 
vast a subject. History, as has become clear from our survey of 
Greece, dififers absolutely from poetry or philosophy in that it 
needs an apparatus for investigation. Philosophy may get a new 
grip upon the questions of reality from a Descartes divesting him- 
self — or trying to do so — of the inheritance of past systems. 
But the historian can never work in isolation. The conditions 
under which Thucydides wrote justify the editor of the merest 
selections for college text-books in revising his story of the Pelopon- 
nesian war, and since the Romans failed to develop historical 
apparatus any more adequate for their purpose than that of the 
Greeks was for Thucydides, we should, at best, have had the same 
kind of exploit over again. From Thucydides to Ammianus 
MarcelHnus stretch almost eight hundred years, during which ran 
the whole drama of the classic world. Yet little, if any, progress 
was made in the work of the historian. On the other hand, from the 
day of Niebuhr, hardly a century ago, to the present, the whole 
perspective of that antiquity has been remade, and a multitude of 
facts established which the antique historians should have known 
but had no way of finding out. Surely no greater proof is needed 
that history to be adequate differs from the rest of literature in 
that it is more science than art, a social rather than an individual 
product. 

The sense of the mediocre character of the historical writings 
of Romans during the Republic, is brought out by Cicero in the 
one treatment of history and its possibilities which has come down 
to us in Latin Hterature. The setting is significant, for it occurs in 
his treatise. On the Orator,^ an imaginary dialogue, placed by 
Cicero in the Tusculan villa of Crassus in the year 91 B.C. The 
principal disputants were the two great orators Lucius Licinius 
Crassus and Marcus Antonius.^ The passage which deals with 

1 Cicero, De Oratore, Bk. II, Chap. XII. It was published by Cicero 55 B.C. The 
extracts quoted here are from the translation by J. S. Watson in Bohn's Classical 
Library, a somewhat literal rendering. 

* Grandfather of the triumvir. 



HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 213 

history occurs in a most incidental way. Antonius has been 
speaking of the fact that no special training is needed by the orator 
to quote official documents in his speeches, — a point with which 
his interlocutor, Catulus,^ agrees : 

"Well, then, to proceed," said Antonius, "what sort of orator, or how great 
a master of language, do you think it requires to write history?" "If to write 
it as the Greeks have written, a man of the highest powers," said Catulus; 
"if as our own countrymen, there is no need of an orator; it is sufficient for the 
writer to tell truth." 

This depreciation of the old Roman historiographers — for so 
mere truth telling is regarded — is apparently brought in to indicate 
the general opinion in which they were held in Cicero's day. It draws 
from Antonius, however, the following justification of the Romans 
by way of a slight historical survey. The most noticeable point 
in this survey is the recognition upon the part of Cicero, — for of 
course it is Cicero who speaks, — that the development of historiog- 
raphy in Greece and Rome took place along exactly similar lines : 

"But," rejoined Antonius, "that you may not despise those of our own 
country, the Greeks themselves too wrote at first just like our Cato, and Pictor, 
and Piso. For history was nothing else but a compilation of annals ; and accord- 
ingly, for the sake of preserving the memory of public events, the pontifex 
maximus used to commit to writing the occurrences of every year, from the 
earliest period of Roman affairs to the time of the Pontifex PubKus Mucins,^ 
and had them engrossed on white tablets, which he set forth as a register in 
his own house, so that all the people had liberty to inspect it ; and these records 
are yet called the Great Annals. This mode of writing many have adopted, 
and, without any ornaments of style, have left behind them simple chronicles 
of times, persons, places, and events. Such, therefore, as were Pherecydes, 
Hellanicus, Acusilas, and many others among the Greeks, are Cato, and Pictor, 
and Piso with us, who neither understand how composition is to be adorned 
(for ornaments of style have been but recently introduced among us), and, 
provided what they related can be vmderstood, think brevity of expression 
the only merit. . . ." 

We shall revert later to this account of the Annales Maximi, 
for it is a prime source, but what interests us here is to follow the 
clue which Cicero offers as to the reasons for the mediocrity of 
Roman history writing. His whole interest is in the style of the 

* Consul with Marius, at the time of the battle with the Cimbri. 
2 Publius Mucius Scaevola. Vide infra, Chap. XIX. 



214 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

writers. The first step forward was, in his eyes, when Antipater, 
the instructor of the orator Crassus, adorned his narrative with 
rhetoric. Admittedly Antipater overdid it,^ but yet history at 
Rome did not amount to much before his time. The implication 
is clear, and is developed by Antonius. History is an art, and as 
such is to be compared with oratory ; and the point is made that 
the Romans have failed to do it justice because they have con- 
centrated too excessively upon forensic eloquence : 

"It is far from being wonderful," said Antonius, "if history has not yet 
made a figure in our language ; for none of our countrymen study eloquence 
except to display it in pleading and in the forum ; whereas among the Greeks, 
the most eloquent men, wholly unconnected with public pleading, sought 
to gain renown in other ways, such as writing history ; for of Herodotus him- 
self, who first lent distinction to this kind of writing, we hear that he was 
never engaged in pleading; yet his eloquence is so great as to delight me 
extremely, as far as I can understand Greek. After him, in my opinion, 
Thucydides has certainly surpassed all historians in the art of composition ; 
for he has such a wealth of material, that he almost equals the number of his 
words by the number of his thoughts. He too, so far as we know, although 
he was engaged in public affairs, was not one of those who engaged in pleading ; 
and he is said to have written his books at a time when he was removed from 
all civil employments, and, as usually happened to every eminent man at Athens, 
was driven into banishment. He was followed by Philistus of Syracuse, who, 
living in great familiarity with the tyrant Dionysius, spent his leisure in writing 
history, and, as I think, principally imitated Thucydides. Afterwards, two 
men of great genius, Theopompus and Ephorus, coming from what we may call 
the noblest school of rhetoric, applied themselves to history by the persuasions 
of their master Isocrates, and never attended to pleading at all. At last 
historians arose also among the philosophers ; first Xenophon, the follower 
of Socrates, and afterwards Callisthenes, the pupil of Aristotle and companion 
of Alexander. The latter wrote in an almost rhetorical manner ; the former 
used a milder strain of language, which has not the animation of oratory, but, 
though perhaps less energetic, is, as it seems to me, much more pleasing. 
Timaeus, the last of all these, but, as far as I can judge, by far the most 
learned, and richest in subject matter and variety of thought, and not un- 
polished in style, brought a large store of eloquence to this kind of writing^ 
but no experience in pleading causes." ^ 

There is a good deal to think about in this slight sketch. It is 
a chapter of the history of History in miniature, the first and only 

» Cicero, op. cit., Bk. II, Chap. XIII. 

* Cicero, De Oratore, Bk. II, Chaps. XIII-XIV. (Translation based on Watson's.) 



HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 215 

one in Latin literature. Yet it deals with Greeks ! Rome had as yet 
produced no such line of great historians. Sallust, Livy and Tacitus 
were yet to come. Cicero knew only one Latin name to match 
the Greeks, the elder Cato ; ^ and in judging him he used Hellenic 
standards. He recognized that the field of history is one by itself, 
and he had a real appreciation of its dignity, but after all, it did 
not interest him as did philosophy. He did not attempt to transmit 
to Rome the ideals of Thucydides, as he did those of the Platonic 
school of thinkers to whom he owed so much.^ Thucydides is 
"a wise and dignified narrator of facts," but he "was never ac- 
counted an orator," and used hard and obscure sentences in his 
speeches; as for Xenophon, though "his style is sweeter than 
honey," it is "as unlike as possible to the noisy style of the forum." 
It is therefore a mistake, says Cicero, to imitate, as some do, the 
one or the other in the training of an orator.^ 

Once having got our bearings, that history is a useful art and 
that its chief use is to furnish inspiration or "points" to the orator, 
it is clear that rules should be at hand for its production, rules that 
the orator might readily apply. Yet no such treatment can be 
found among the works on rhetoric ; and this leads Cicero to supply 
the need, in an oft-quoted passage : 

" Who is ignorant that the first law in writing history is that the historian 
must not dare to say anything that is false, and the next, that he must dare to 
tell the truth ? Also that there must be no suspicion of partiality or of personal 
animosity? These fundamental rules are doubtless universally known. The 
superstructure depends on facts and style. The course of facts (rerum ratio) 
requires attention to order of time and descriptions of countries ; and since, in 
great affairs, such as are worthy of remembrance, we look first for the designs, 
then the actions, and afterwards the results, it should also show what designs the 
writer approves ;. and with regard to the actions, not only what was done or said, 
but in what manner ; and when the result is stated, all the causes contributing to 
it, whether arising from accident, wisdom, or temerity. As to the characters 
concerned, not only their acts should be set forth but the life and manners of at 

» Vide infra, Chap. XIX. 

^ Cf. Cicero, Orator, Chaps. III-IV : "I confess that I have been made an orator 
(if indeed I am one at all, or such as I am), not by the workshop of the rhetoricians, 
but by the works of the Academy." It is philosophy that stirs the imagination of the 
great orator, and imagination is the main thing in eloquence (not facts!). 

' Cicero, Orator, Chap. IX. The admission of this vogue is as significant as 
Cicero's comment. 



2i6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

least those eminent in reputation and dignity. The sort of language and 
character of style to be observed must be regular and continuous, flowing with 
a kind of equable smoothness, without the roughness of judicial pleadings, 
and the sharp-pointed sentences used at the bar. Concerning all these nu- 
merous and important points, there are no rules, do you observe, to be found 
in the treatises of the rhetoricians. . . . " ^ 

It is perhaps somewhat confusing, in an introductory chapter, 
to have the doors thus thrown open upon the central theme. But 
Cicero reveals more than he intends, and one sees from these sUght 
sketches what there was in the Roman attitude toward history 
which determined its whole character. Two things stand out : the 
practical bent of the Roman, and his Greek education. History 
is an aid to statesmen and orators, furnishing examples of actions 
to emulate or avoid, or illustrations for speeches, which the user 
— if not the historian himself ^ — may improve to suit the needs 
of an idea or a phrase.' Truth for truth's sake is all right in its 
way ; but truth that is apt and to the point, in debate or in practice, 
is worth more to a Roman. Now history abounds in truths that 
may be apphed ; the trouble is that in applying them one is likely 
to destroy the nexus of events and lose the sense of historical 
relationships, of that process, in short, which gives meaning to the 
whole.^ Pragmatic history, in spite of the plea of Polybius,^ is 
dangerous business. The practical Roman, however, was not so 
much interested in any other kind. And his native bent was not 
corrected by his Greek education. "Greece captive, captured 
Rome," as the saying ran. And the Greeks who achieved this 
cultural triumph were the grammarians and rhetoricians who 
taught the Latins the arts of elegance and sophistication.® The 

I ^ Cicero, De Oratore, Bk. II, Chap. XV. (Translation based on Watson's.) 

2 Cf Quintilian's dictum, De Institutione Oratoria, Bk. X, Chap, i, Sect. 31 

" Historia .... scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum." 

' Cf. Cicero, Brutus, Chap. XI. " It is the privilege of rhetoricians to exceed the 

truth of history that they may have the opportunity of embellishing the fate of their 

heroes." 

* In other words, destroy the history. Vide supra, Chap. I, for definition. 

5 It would be interesting to speculate as to how much of Polybius' pragmatism is a 
reflection of Roman influences. 

* Philosophy proper was best to be studied by travel, especially by going to 
Athens, much as many Americans have gone to Europe for their post-graduate studies. 

Cf. H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litteratur uber die rbmische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius 
I und ihre Quellen (2 vols., 1897), Vol. I, Chap. I {Die Geschichte in der JugendMldung.) 



HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 217 

effect of Greece upon Rome was seen in history as in poetry and 
in religion, a constant influence reaching all the way from the 
transformation of its early legends to embellishments of style in 
the later writers. 

The legendary element in Roman history has little place in a 
history, for it is the most unhistorical product imaginable, being 
invention rather than folk-myths,^ and supplanting the simple 
annals of the poor by suggestions of strange adventures that linked 
the origins of Rome with the great days of Troy. To the Roman 
there was little worthy of record in the humble story of his little 
farmer-state, strugghng with its neighbors of Latium. There are 
no contemporary legends of the long period of history in which 
Rome grew from a group of villages on the hills by the swampy 
back-water of the Tiber, to be the chief city of the western plain. 
Contemporary data begin only when Rome was already con- 
quering the Mediterranean. 2 And as both Polybius and Livy 
"recognized as the chief principle of historical criticism that there 
can be no trustworthy and sincere history where there have not 
been contemporary historians " ^ we may frankly and shortly dismiss, 
as not germane to our subject, the legendary heritage which Rome 
possessed from its earliest days. It remained for a Wissowa or a 
Fowler in our own day to recover, from the fragmentary remains 
of cult and myth, of law and custom, the Hving picture of that 
quaint if unheroic life of wattled hut and market-place which left 
its traces on the Roman character, but which the glamour of 
Greece and of Rome's own great career obscured until the critics 
of the nineteenth century began their destructive and reconstruc- 
tive work."* 

'C/. W. Soltau, Die Anfdnge der roemischen Geschichtschreihung (1909), pp. 1-4. 
Only the scientific mind has a sense of the significance of the obscure. So long as 
history is considered as primarily one of the literary arts such things escape it. 

^ Ibid., p. 228. 

3 E. Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History (1905), p. 12. 

* This is not the place for a comprehensive survey of the remaking of early Roman 
history. The groundwork of historical criticism was laid by Louis de Beaufort, in his 
Dissertation sur I'incertittide des cinq premiers siecles de Vhistoire romaine (1738). B. G. 
Niebuhr's great work is still of absorbing interest. The first two volumes of his 
R'&mische Geschichte appeared in 181 2, a third in 1832, and his Lectures in 1846. The 
reaction against his negative criticism has generally taken the line that the growth 



2i8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

If the legends of early Rome were unreal, even as legends, we 
need hardly delay over the way in which the epic poets immortal- 
ized them. And yet, this was history to Romans, almost, if not 
quite, as the Homeric poems were to Greeks. Indeed, the epos 
of Rome was a recurring echo of the great voice of Homer. It was 
not necessarily due to any inherent weakness of the Roman imagina- 
tion, as is often supposed ; nor to any abstract nature of the Italian 
gods ; ^ it was rather due to the absence of a great adventure. 
There was no racial sense among the dwellers of Latium as among 
the Greeks; they had no ''barbarian" world against which to 
sharpen their national consciousness. Moreover, they were con- 
quered by Etruscans and the greatest age of the early period was 
under foreign kings. Hence there was Httle chance for an epic 
of glorious war. As for the abstract deities, the gods of early 
peoples are not abstract; we are beginning now to understand 
better the cults and faith of early Rome. There were no great 
divine happenings, simply because the worshippers had done 
nothing heroic; for the myth of the gods is a reflection of the 
human story. The deities of Rome were obscure, not abstract. 
Later, there was no need to invent new epic poetry when that of 
Greece had been captured, and brought home along with the rest 
of the booty .^ 

The first of the predecessors of Vergil was Andronicus (c. 284- 
204 B.C.), who translated the Odyssey into Latin. The wander- 
ings of Ulysses into those western seas which wash the shores of 
Italy, rather than the siege of Troy itself, was the suggestive theme 

of Rome might be traced fairly well through an analysis of its institutions. T. 
Mommsen's Ramische Geschichte (ist ed., 1854-1856) deliberately ignored the early 
period as unhistorical, but even the credit which he was willing to allow the later 
sources on the regal era (in his various studies), has been denied by the vigorous 
skepticism of E. Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Chap. I {The Critical 
Method). See recent manuals of Roman History, especially W. Ihne's History of Rome 
(1871-1882), and the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Roman History, where there 
is a short but excellent history of Roman historiography. 

* Cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, History of Roman Literature, Vol. I, Sect. 20. 

* There is no argument for any native lack of inventive capacity in the Romans 
because they appropriated Greek culture. Compare America today, which copies 
everything European, down to millinery. Yet we like to think that our inventive 
faculties are still available and could be shifted to other uses than those of business, in 
case of need. The point is that circumstances rather than natural capacity dictate 
our activities. 



HISTORY AT ROME ; ORATORY AND POETRY 219 

for Italians. Then came Naevius (d. 199 b.c), who wrote the 
story of the first Punic war, which he had himself seen, in "the 
style of a mediseval chronicle, but with a rhyming, mythological 
framework, after the Homeric manner (Juno as the enemy, Venus 
as the friend of the Trojans, Jupiter and Apollo taking personal 
part in the action)." ^ But the one who more than any other, 
except Vergil himself, fastened the poetic legend of Trojan origins 
upon Roman history was Ennius (d. 169 b.c), whose Annates were 
placed by Cicero on the plane of the history of Herodotus for 
reliabihty,^ whom Livy used as a source, and upon whom Vergil 
built. He traced the history of Rome from the landing of ^Eneas 
in Italy down to his own time, at the end of the second century B.C. 
Ennius was considerably more of a historian than one would at 
first suspect from the medium he used, for he availed himself of the 
Homeric device of accumulating hsts and exact data in order to 
record not imaginary but historical or at least legendary material.^ 
His narrative was influenced by his intimate relations with the 
older Scipio Africanus, and tends to take the side of the Scipios 
in the politics of the great Roman houses, as against the Fabians, 
who had as their exponent the first Roman historian — to be con- 
sidered in the following chapter — Q. Fabius Pictor. Ennius 
was successful in outbidding Pictor in popularity, and the story 
of the old families as preserved in later days obscured the 
exploits of the Fabians. But the creator of the Latin hexameter, 
for Ennius has that distinction, did not allow these clannish interests 
to obscure the main one, which was the history of Rome itself. 
We come at the outset, therefore, upon the striking fact that in 
poetry as in prose, from first to last, the chief aim of Latin literature, 
responsive to the demands of national outlook, is the exaltation of 
the state. 

The culmination of the poetic legend in Latin was, of course, 
Vergil's jEneid. Merely to recall it here shows how far from the 
narrow paths of history those delusive, quasi-historical interests 
take us, which linked the Rome of Augustus with the story of its 
origins. It was a work of genius to carry into the sophisticated 

* Teuffel-Schwabe, History of Roman Literature, Vol. I, Sect. 95, n. 8. 

* Cicero, De Divinatione, Bk. II, Chap. LVI. 

' Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 278-279. 



220 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

age of the Principate the simplicity and charm of a tale of the 
olden time; to recreate Homer, as it were, consciously, and to 
impress both for his own time and succeeding ages a sense of reality 
upon mere poetic imaginings by the sheer, inevitable quality of art. 
Yet this assent which he won for a fabricated myth was secured 
less by the Homeric power of narrative than by stirring the emotions 
of readers over the fate of his characters. St. Augustine tells us 
how deeply he was affected, as a youth, by the story of Dido, dying 
for the love of ^neas, a tale with a charm to rival the Christian 
epos.^ Vergil shows how human sympathy may translate even the 
grotesque into the field of experience. Next to this emotional sugges- 
tiveness must be mentioned the religious quahty of Vergil's mind, 
that pietas or reverence, which calls forth a responsive note wher- 
ever the universal "will to beheve" is supported by emotion. It 
was reverence for the greatness in Rome's destiny which tinged 
even the remote distances with dignity, while the spell of the 
past lent, in turn, to the present a gleam of poetry and romance. 
Moreover, the narrative, varied as it was from simple, natural scenes, 
in keeping with the quiet of the poet's own temper, to the splendor 
of imperial visions, offered a pageant of life and color which, until 
then, was unknown in Latin literature. It is small wonder, there- 
fore, that the myth content of the yEneid became fixed upon Rome 
as a substitute for history. 

If consideration of the myths of Rome has carried us over into 
the field of Latin poetry, before we have so much as secured a foot- 
hold in that of history proper, we may as well profit by the occasion, 
before turning to the sober beginnings of prose annals, to consider 
here a poem which stands apart from all others, not only in 
Latin, but in the world's Hterature, and which is of deep and last- 
ing interest to thoughtful students of history — the poem of Lu- 
cretius, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). If Vergil 
stands with Homer, in epic power and universality of appeal, 
Lucretius suggests comparison rather with Dante or Milton, both 
in the sombre "fanatical faith" in his scheme of the universe, and 
in his sense of a religious mission, to rid the world of superstition.^ 

^ Augustine, Confessiones, Bk. I, Chap. XIII. 

*C/. A. W. Verrall, in A Companion to Latin Studies, edited by J. E. Sandys 
(ad ed., i9i3)> PP- 612-613. 



HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 221 

But the vision of the world which he proposed to substitute for 
that of popular imagination was not, as in the case of Dante or 
Milton, merely a reinterpretation of accepted beUefs, refined 
through Aristotelian or bibhcal media. Lucretius proposed to 
dispense with myth entirely; and, many centuries before its day, 
wrote in terms of science. It is a poem for the twentieth century, 
in this sense perhaps the most marvellous performance in all antique 
literature. Any survey of antique processes of mind as they bear 
upon the development of historical outlook would be sadly in- 
complete without an examination of De Rerum Natura. 

Of the life of Lucretius Cams (c. 95-55 b.c.) little is known.* 
The one poem which has been left us appeared just before Vergil's 
day, and, " though it not only revealed a profound and extraordinary 
genius, but marked a new technical level in Latin poetry, stole 
into the world all but unnoticed," ^ whereas the Mneid was pro- 
duced (and even preserved) ^ under the direct patronage of Augustus. 
In neither style nor message was there any of the appealing charm 
of Vergil ; but a scheme of the world based upon Epicurean philos- 
ophy, cast into a ringing, if metallic, verse. Much of this lies outside 
our field; we are not concerned here with atomistic theories nor 
with the fate of the dead, nor even with the effort to justify man's 
place in the universe by displacing superstition and the fear of the 
gods. But there is more than a philosophy of history in the mar- 
vellous fifth book, which traces the birth of the world and then, after 
the scientific postulates of creation, attempts a survey of the 
beginnings of hfe, of men, and of civilization. Strongly countering 
that natural tendency to look backward to a golden age, a dawn 
of innocence in an Eden of the gods, such as the Jews or Greeks 
had accepted, Lucretius begins with the slow evolution of life from 
lower forms to higher ; first vegetable, then animal ; then primitive 

* The brief notice in St. Jerome's Chronicle, stating that he lost his reason through 
a drug and wrote in the intervals of sanity, and that Cicero with his own hand edited 
the poem, while practically the only account we have, is open to suspicion on each of 
the three supposed facts which it supplies. The account in J. W. Mackail's Latin 
Literature, Bk. I, Chap. IV, while short, is satisfactory. For detailed bibliography 
see Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit. 

* J. W. Mackail, op. cit., p. 40. 

' Vergil, dying before he had the chance to work it over as he wished, had left 
instructions that it should be destroyed. Augustus countermanded these orders. 



222 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

man, suffering much but living a wild and hardy life. The begin- 
ning of civilization and the central fact of social origins accord- 
ing to Lucretius, as also according to the sociologists today, was the 
discovery and use of fire ; it came, not as a gift of a god, but either 
from lightning setting trees aflame, or from the friction of dry 
boughs in the wind. No Vulcan brought fire and its blessings to 
men ; natural causes led to its discovery. Then control of metals 
brought an ever-enlarging control over nature ; and with settled 
life came politics and the state, the arts and sciences. Even 
religion had a natural origin, although, through dreams by night 
and the awe engendered by mystery, mankind created its gods by 
its own imaginings and so obscured the patent but elusive truth. 
This generalized plan of human advance is not history in the 
narrower sense ; but where such a genius as that of Lucretius 
illustrates the process, it offers the historian more suggestion than 
he sometimes proves worthy of receiving. We may, therefore, 
close this chapter by quoting a section or two from the one poet- 
critic and philosophic thinker of antiquity who eliminated from his 
mind that entire myth-picture of social origins which, in one form 
or another, obscured with its mirage the vision of all antiquity ; and 
who, by so doing, anticipated much of modern discovery. 

Quotation from Lucretius is difl&cult, both because the expres- 
sion itself is often involved and because the poem so holds together 
that extracts fail to carry the argument. But one may catch a 
glimpse of its graphic power from the lines which describe the 
various possible ways in which the smelting of metals may have 
been learned : 

"... copper and gold and iron were discovered, and with them the weight 
of sUver and the usefulness of lead, when a fire had burnt down vast forests with 
its heat on mighty mountains, either when heaven's lightning was hurled 
upon it, or because waging a forest- war with one another men had carried 
fire among the foe to rouse panic, or else because allured by the richness of 
the land they desired to clear the fat fields, and make the countryside into 
pastures, or else to put the wild beasts to death, and enrich themselves with 
prey. For hunting with pit and fire arose first before fencing the grove with 
nets and scaring the beasts with dogs. However that may be, for whatever 
cause the flaming heat had eaten up the forests from their deep roots with 
terrible crackling, and had baked the earth with fire, the streams of sUver and 
gold, and likewise of copper and lead, gathered together and trickled from the 



HISTORY AT ROME; ORATORY AND POETRY 223 

boiling veins into hollow places in the ground. And when they saw them after- 
wards hardened and shining on the ground with brilliant hue, they picked 
them up, charmed by their smooth bright beauty, and saw that they were 
shaped with outUne like that of the several prints of the hollows. Then it 
came home to them that these metals might be melted by heat, and would 
run into the form and figure of an)^hing, and indeed might be hammered out 
and shaped into points and tips, however sharp and fine, so that they might 
fashion weapons for themselves, and be able to cut down forests and hew timber 
and plane beams smooth, yea, and to bore and punch and drill holes. And, 
first of all, they set forth to do this no less with silver and gold than with the 
resistless strength of stout copper; all in vain, since their power was van- 
quished and yielded, nor could they like the others endure the cruel strain. 
Then copper was of more value, and gold was despised for its uselessness, so 
soon blunted with its dull edge. Now copper is despised, gold has risen to the 
height of honour. So rolling time changes the seasons of things. What was 
of value, becomes in turn of no worth; and then another thing rises up and 
leaves its place of scorn, and is sought more and more each day, and when 
found blossoms into fame, and is of wondrous honour among men." ^ 

Then follow a disquisition on the art of war and a rapid series 
of pictures of the various stages of social development, pastoral, 
agricultural and urban, ending with the luxuries of civilization. 

" So, Uttle by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and 
reason raises it up into the coasts of fight." ^ 

The pathway to those coasts of light, which Lucretius pointed 
out, unhappily lay untravelled ; and there was ample justification 
for the poignant lines which he interjected into the sketch of 
history, when treating of the origins of religion — lines which 
match the noblest protests of reason in the face of mystery in all 
literature : 

" Ah ! unhappy race of men, when it has assigned such acts to the gods and 
joined therewith bitter anger! what groaning did they then beget for them- 
selves, what sores for us, what tears for our children to come ! Nor is it piety 
at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone, and to draw 
near to every altar, no, nor to be prostrate on the ground with outstretched 
palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the stream- 
ing blood of beasts, nor to link vow to vow; but rather to be able to contem- 
plate all things with a mind at rest." * 

1 Lucretius, De Rerum Nntura, Bk. V, 11. 1241-1280, translated by C. Bailey, 1910. 
(Reprinted by permission of the Clarendon Press.) 

2 Ibid., Bk. V, 11. 1454-1455. 3 ii^d., Bk. V, 11. 1194-1203. 



224 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

^ But the mind of Lucretius was not "at rest." Such gloomy 
might is not serenity. Its very poise is protest — protest against 
that "will to believe" which is the universal barrier to science. 
No wonder the world at large shrank from such stern rationalism, 
and preferred the genial, mythical stories of Vergil. 



CHAPTER XIX 

ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORIANS 

In the last chapter much was made of the Greek characteristics 
of the Latin legends of origin. It is possible, however, that the 
taste for indigenous historical materials was stronger in Rome than 
one would suspect from the slight remains we possess. Cicero 
tells us how the Roman nobles loved to be glorified in poetry.* 
The ancestral cult of Rome, combined with this aristocratic tendency 
of noble houses to exalt their deeds, was, naturally, one of the main- 
springs of Roman history. It was a tainted spring, but bountiful. 

" It was customary (says Cicero in another place ^) in most families of note, 
to preserve their images, their trophies of honor, and their memoirs, either to 
adorn a fimeral when any of the family died, or to perpetuate the fame 
of their ancestors, or to prove their own nobility. But the truth of history has 
been much corrupted by these laudatory essays; for many circumstances 
were recorded in them which never happened, such as false triumphs, a pre- 
tended succession of consulships, and false connections and distinctions, when 
men of inferior rank were confounded with a noble family of the same name ; as 
if I myself should pretend that I am descended from Manius Tullius, who was 
a Patrician, and shared the consulship with Servius Sulpicius, about ten years 
after the expidsion of the kings." 

Such records of noble families, reaching back to primitive tradi- 
tion and written down later by slaves or dependents, formed one of 
the chief sources for Roman historians when dealing with the early 
period. They knew, as Cicero did, that the material was not worth 

' Cicero, Pro Archia, Chaps. X-XI, Sects. 26-27. The description given here of 
the means taken by the Roman dignitaries to preserve their names and exalt their 
glory reminds one somewhat of the inscriptions of Egypt or Babylon. Cf. H. Peter, 
Die geschichtliche Litter atur iiber die romische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Qtiellen, 
Vol. I, Chap. II (Das geschichtliche Interesse des Publikums). 

* Cicero, Brutus, Chap. XVI. (Translation based on Watson's.) 

225 



226 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

much ; ^ but they did not know how to apply the canons of historical 
criticism so as to move surely and safely through their treacherous 
offerings. 

By way of these specious antecedents of history we pass from 
poetry to prose, that farthest flung line of the scientific advance. 
Prose literature, developing slowly and late in Rome as elsewhere, 
naturally came more directly under Greek influence than poetry. 
Written Latin prose did not rise to rival the spoken Latin until 
Cicero's day, which partly explains why there is so much about 
orators in Cicero's essays and the echo of a similar interest in the 
historians — even in Tacitus. Moreover, Latin prose literature had 
a short period of flower, declining after the first century of the 
empire, partly because the formahsm of the patrician periods was 
out of keeping with the realism of business, and partly because 
the men of the provinces developed their varied forms of speech. 
History-writing among the Romans did not, therefore, develop its 
own natural media of expression, but like a borrowed or captured 
piece of art remained more or less out of place in its setting. The 
fagade was Attic, or afi"ected by Attic influences ; yet the structure 
of most Roman histories was of the simplest and homeliest of designs 
— that of the annal. 

The starting point for this annalistic treatment was that register 
of annual events kept by the Pontifex Maximus in the Regia, which 
has been described above in the passage from Cicero.^ It was 
there where "all the people had the liberty to inspect it." So 
important was it, that its style "was adopted by many" of the 

' In this connection mention should be made of the use of the old inscriptions by 
the later historians. Monumental inscriptions were used by both Greek and Roman 
historians of early Rome, but they were sometimes misled by what they saw, and the 
monuments became foundations for new myths, as is likely to be the case anywhere 
if full contemporary records are missing. Vide supra, the myth of Osiris. E. Pais, 
Ancient Legends of Roman History, Chap. VII, has a good discussion on this point. 

^ C/. p. 213. On the Annales Maximi there has been considerable discussion. 
The few fragments concerning them are given in H. Peter's Historicorum Romanorum 
Reliquiae (2 vols., 1906-1914, with Bibliography to 1914), Vol. I, pp. iii-xxk {De 
Annalibus Maximis); cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, History of Roman Literature, Vol. I, Sects. 
73-77. The contributions of O. Seeck, Die Kalendertafel der Pontifices (1885), and of 
W. Soltau, Romische Chronologie (pp. 442 sqq.), may be cited ; but the field is intricate 
as can be seen from the article Annales (by Cichorius) in Pauly-Wissowa, Real- 
Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. I, pp. 224S sqq. 



ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORIANS 227 

earlier Roman historians, a style " without any ornaments," ** simple 
chronicles of times, persons, places and events." In the eyes of 
Cicero, history at Rome developed mainly along the lines of this 
annalistic writing ; and so it had up to his time. The description 
he gives is confirmed by an examination of the available references 
to obscure authors and by the traces they have left upon the method 
of Livy and Tacitus themselves. 

The extract from Cicero on the Annates Maximi, slight as it is, 
is matched by only one other paragraph in the Latin literature which 
has come down to us. In the closing part of the fourth century of 
our era, Servius, a grammarian, who wrote an exhaustive com- 
mentary on Vergil, described the pontifical annals as follows : 

" The annals were made in this way. The pontifex maximus had a white 
tablet (prepared) every year, on which, on certain days,' he was accustomed to 
note, imder the names of the consuls and other magistrates, those deeds both 
at home and in the field, on land or at sea, which were deemed worthy to be 
held in remembrance. The diligence of the ancients inscribed 80 books with 
these annual commentaries, and these were called Annales Maximi from the 
Pontifices Maximi by whom they were made. . . ." ^ 

The starting point for our survey is therefore the Regia, or house 
of the head of that college of priests, the pontifices, who had perpet- 
uated the religious duties of the abolished kingship, having charge 
of the calendar and the archives, that is, both the measurement and 
the record of time. The album or white wood tablet which our 
sources describe — and the two quoted are practically all there are 
on the Annales Maximi — was therefore but one of several records 
in their keeping. In addition to those which dealt more especially 
with sacred science, the Libri pontificum and the Commentarii 
pontificum, there were also Fasti calendar es or Fasti consular es^ 
with the names of officials and items for the calendar. The Annales 

* Per singulos dies, not every day, but when the event happened. Hence the acta 
diurna, or official daily bulletin from the time of Julius Caesar, was not a continuation 
of this. Vide O. Seeck, Die Kalenderlafel der Pontifices, p. 62 ; H. Peter, Historicorutn 
Romanorum Reliquiae, Vol. I, p. x. 

* Senni Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, edited by George 
Thilo and Hermann Hagen (3 vols., 1878-1887), Vol. I, Bk. I, 1. 373. This para- 
graph occurs only in the manuscript published by Daniel in 1600. On whether 
it belongs to Servius or to a later commentator see the edition by Thilo and the 
bibliographical indications in Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 431, n. 2, 



228 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

diflfered from the rest in that they were prepared for the public. 
How extensive they were is a matter of conjecture. Cicero rhetori- 
cally dates them from the very origin of Rome.^ The repeated 
destruction of the Regia by fire really left the later Roman anti- 
quaries in the dark as to their actual extent. It seems likely, how- 
ever, that no contemporary pontifical annal of the kind described 
was kept during the long period when Rome grew from a group of 
farming villages to be the chief city of Latium. The contemporary 
history began rather in the period of the conquest of the Medi- 
terranean.2 In any case the sack of Rome by the Gauls destroyed 
whatever the pontiffs had preserved. Livy tells us that ''what- 
ever was contained in the commentaries of the pontiffs and other 
public and private records, was lost, for the most part, in the burning 
of the city." ^ The great pile of dry wood in the Regia was right 
at hand for the Gauls to warm themselves, and the tablets must 
have made good fuel.^ The result was that, whatever historical 
data the early pontiffs prepared, the later Romans could not 
profit from them. Year by year, 'however, during the robust 
period of the republican expansion, the Pontifex would hang up the 
white tablet on the wall of his house for the citizens to see, and for 
such as could, to read. The practice lasted until about 1 20 B.C. when, 
owing to the growth of the histories by private individuals, it be- 
came superfluous. Then P. Mucins Scaevola published the whole 
extant collection in one volume of eighty books, as Servius intimates 
in the extract above. ^ Upon the whole it would seem that this 
official history shared the defects of such compositions, as we have 
noted them elsewhere, with only this in its favor, that in a republic 
the rival claims of leaders and clans act in some degree in the place 
of criticism. Whether it was the prominence of these official annals 

' "Ab initio rerum Romanarura." 

* C/. W. Soltau, Die Anfange der roemischen Geschichtschreibung, p. 228; A. 
Enmann, Die aelteste Redaction der Pontificalannalen (in Rheinisches Museum, 
Vol. LV (1902), pp. 517-533), places the origin of the yearly tablet for public use at 
about 400 B.C. 

^Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. VI, Chap. I. 

* O. Seeck, Die Kalendertafel der Poniifices, p. 74. In fact their menace to the safety 
of the surrounding buildings was almost as great as the pile of inflammable papers by 
the heating plants of some of the buildings in Washington. 

^ E. Pais announced in Ancient Legends of Roman History (1905), Chap. I, that 
he has been gathering the fragments of the Annates Maximi for publication. 



ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORIANS 229 

or not which, in the absence of genuine historical literature, made 
the annalistic, or at least chronological, structure the chief orthodox 
form for history-writing in Latin, the fact remains that Roman 
historiography is strikingly held to the annalistic mould. Even 
Tacitus' Annates bear (though disguised) the common impress.^ 
Indeed the word annal was much more the synonym for "history" 
than historia. Not only was it used in that general sense in which it 
is used in English in such phrases as "the annals of the poor" or 
"the annals of the Empire," ^ but in the eyes of the grammarians it 
was the only correct term for history of the past. Historia was 
properly used only of contemporaneous narrative.^ So, indeed, 
we find the works of Tacitus which deal with his own day termed 
Historiae and those dealing with an earlier period Annates, although 
these titles probably do not come from Tacitus' own hand.^ 

The official annals, therefore, seem to have played a consider- 
able role in early Roman historiography. Of the remaining books 
of the priesthood, the Fasti are, perhaps, the most important. 
These began as hsts of days for the calendar, the lucky and un- 
lucky days — dies fasti and dies nefasti; and as such remained, 
through a varied history, the basis of calendar-making on down, 

* On the influence of the old annalistic forms on Tacitus' works see E. Courbaud, 
Les precedes d 'art de Tacite dans les Histoires (19 18), p. 34 and references. 

* So Ennius called his epic Annates; and when Vergil refers to the content of early 
history he uses the same general term. Cf. Mneid, Bk. I, 1. 373, Et vacet annales 
nostrorum audire lahorum. 

'Thus Servius, commenting on the line of Vergil quoted here, says: "There is 
this difference between history and annals : history deals with these times which we 
witness or have been able to witness. The word comes from iaropeiv, that is 'to 
see ' (dicta avb tov IcTopetv, id est videre) ; but annals are of those times of which 
our age is ignorant. Hence Livy consists of both annals and history. Nevertheless 
they are freely used one for the other, as in this place where he says 'annals' for 'his- 
tory.'" Aulus Gellius had earlier {Nodes Attkae, Book V, Chap. XVIII) cited the 
authority of Verrius Flaccus the lexicographer for this distinction of meaning and ad- 
duced practically the only fragment we have of Sempronius Asellio, one of the later 
annalists, to show that the narrower meaning of the word, a yearly list of happenings, 
was their ideal of history. Asellio is impatient with the narrowness of those who do 
not connect the isolated items of war or conquest with the broader theme of politics, 
and terms such monastic annals fabulas pueris, unworthy the name of history. For 
discussion of this point see Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, Sect. 37, n. 3. 

* It is doubtful if they bore any such titles, but more likely, as in the case of Livy, 
whose work was termed Ab urbe condita libri, the annals of Tacitus were probably 
Ab excessu d. AugusH. 



230 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

* 

even through the Julian reform and into the Christian era. The 
name was therefore naturally transferred as well to denote annahstic 
chronicles, Usts of years giving the names of the consuls, etc. {Fasti 
consulates) and the lists of triumphs {Fasti triumphales) . Two such 
lists were drawn up in the reign of Augustus.^ 

In addition to the Annates Maximi and the Fasti of the pontiffs, 
there were lists of secular magistrates, such as the Libri magistra- 
tuum or Books of the Magistrates, reminding one of the Eponym Usts 
of the Assyrians. Some of them were written on linen {libri 
lintei) and kept in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Goddess of 
Memory, on the Capitol. Livy may have these in mind when hfe 
refers repeatedly to the libri magistratuum,^ or he may use the term 
to cover all similar sources and even the Annates Maximi. For, by 
the end of the repubhcan era there were a number of such collec- 
tions, and antiquarians were already working on them. 

When we turn from these materials for history to history itself, 
we find, significantly enough, that the line of Roman historians is 
headed by one who wrote in Greek. Q. Fabius Pictor is commonly 
recognized as the first Roman historian.^ Born about 254 B.C. of 
distinguished family, he played a leading part in the wars with 
Ligurians and Gauls, before the war with Hannibal, in which he 
also took part. His History {la-Topia), which carried the story 
of Rome from the days of ^Eneas to his own time, was en- 
riched by access to the archives of his family, in which — as has 
been the case so often in our day — the official documents of official 
members of the family had found a resting place. He wrote for 
the nobles, not for the commonalty (as did his contemporary Plautus, 
the author of comedy), and memoirs of nobles are also traceable in 
his work. In fact, history-writing in Rome remained down to the 

i 

^See the articles Fasti in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiquites, 
and (by Schon) in Pauly-Wissowa's Real-Encyclopadie. The Fasti Triumphales have 
just been published in an exhaustively critical edition by E. Pais (2 vols., 1920) in the 
Collezione difesti e monumenti romani of E. Pais and F. Stella Maranca. 

2 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. H, Chap. IV; Bk. IV, Chaps. VII, XX. 

3 Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 273 sqq., whose account has been 
mainly used for what follows. For the fragments of Fabius Pictor see H. Peter, 
Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae, Vol. I, pp. LXIX-C, pp. 5-39. There was appar- 
ently a Latin translation or version. 



ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORIANS 231 

days of Sulla, a privilege of the upper class, from which it drew its 
readers and to which it appealed, leaving a perspective for Roman 
social history which only modern scholarship has been able in part 
to correct. As for Fabius Pictor, he furnished Polybius with his main 
guide for the second Punic war, in spite of Polybius' uncomplimen- 
tary remarks about him, due, perhaps, as has been suggested, to 
the rivalry of the Scipios (Polybius' patrons) with the Fabii.^ While 
Livy apparently included him in the indefinite references to the 
"most ancient writers," he also twice refers to him specifically as 
" the oldest historian " and once as the trustworthy contemporary 
of the events described, whose name cited in the texts would substan- 
tiate the narrative.^ After Livy's day he ceased to be known to 
Roman authors, although he was still used by Greek historians. 

The real father of Roman history, however, was M. Porcius 
Cato, that most Roman of Romans, who fought the influence of 
Greece, yet revealed a mind saturated in Greek thought, and who, 
according to Cicero and Nepos, learned Greek itself late in life.^ 
Born about 234 B.C. he lived a busy public life, holding the highest 
offices, and meanwhile writing earnestly and much at those earhest 
books of Latin prose, his treatises on agriculture, war, oratory, as 
well as history. His history, the seven books of Origines, was a 
national work, but it repeated the Greek myths of origin. The 
prefaces to his books recall the school of Isocrates which he 
ridiculed ; * and his pragmatic outlook recommending history for 
practical uses,^ while natural enough in a Roman, was also to be 
found in the Greeks from whom he professedly turned away. 
Again, although he kept to the annalistic form, he found it admirably 
suited for the insertion of orations in the formal style, and inserted 
them to such an extent that the speeches were even brought to- 
gether as a special collection by themselves. 

Cato was a thorough and careful worker ; all Latin writers bear 
witness to that. Cicero refers to his study of the inscriptions on 

^ The Histories of Polybius, Bk. Ill, Chaps. VIII-IX ; cf. Teufifel-Schwabe, op. cit., 
Vol. I, Sect. 116, n. 2, with references. 

2 Cf. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. I, Chap. XLIV; Bk. II, Chap. XL; Bk. XXU, 
Chap. VII. 

' Cf. H. Peter, Wahrkeit und Kunst, pp. 282 sq. 

* Cf. Plutarch, Vitae Paralldae, Chap. XXIII {Cato). 

' Cf. H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae, Fragment 3. 



232 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

tombstones * — which may also reflect a lesson from the Greeks. 
But his interest did not extend to the varied data of the social life, 
it was strictly limited to politics. A citation preserved by Aulus 
Gellius, a chatty antiquary of the second century a.d., is worth 
quoting : 

" They [the Romans] were not very strenuous in their endeavours to explore 
the causes of the eclipses of the sun and moon. For M. Cato, who was in- 
defatigable in his researches after learning, has spoken upon this subject in- 
decisively and without curiosity. His words in the fourth book of Origins are 
these : ' I have no inclination to transcribe what appears on the tablet of the 
Pontifex Maximus, how often corn is dear, how often the light of the sun or 
moon is, from some cause or other, obscured.* "* 

From the valuable treatise on agriculture which he left us, we 
can imagine that Cato followed the grain quotations of the Regia 
very closely, and as he brought to the task of history-writing the 
training of a practical man, we have every reason to regret that 
he did not do exactly the thing he here refuses to do. The one 
thing, however, which the whole of this survey teaches, is that his- 
tory reflects the major interests of the society which produces it, and 
that the insight of historians into the importance of events is 
relatively slight, except as they are interpreters of their own time. 
The dominant interest of the men around Cato was no longer 
agriculture, as in the early days of the farmer-state, but war and 
politics and the struggle with Carthage. Hence the trivial inci- 
dents of the priestly annals were to be ignored. 

Subsequent historians at Rome agreed with Cato in this, but 
they ceased to struggle as he did against the Greek invasion, and 
as rhetoric gained the day more and more, Cato was less and less 
read until, in Cicero's day, he was almost entirely left aside. It is 
interesting, therefore, to find Cicero himself turning to Cato's 
defence, for it shows what solid worth there must have been in 
the first of the Roman historians : 

"Not to omit his [Cato's] Antiquities, who will deny that these also are 
adorned with every flower, and with all the lustre of eloquence ? And yet he has 
scarcely any admirers ; which some ages ago was the case of Philistus the Syra- 

' Cicero, Cato Maior, Chap. XI, Sect. 38; Chap. VII, Sect. 21. 
« The AUic Ntghts of Aultis Gellius, Bk. H, Chap. XXVni. (Translated by 
W. Beloe.) 



ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORLVNS 233 

cusan, and even of Thucydides' himself. For as the lofty and elevated style 
of Theopompus soon diminished the reputation of their pithy and laconic 
harangues,' which were sometimes scarcely intelligible from excessive brevity 
and quaintness; and as Demosthenes eclipsed the glory of Lysias; so the 
pompous and stately elocution of the modems has obscured the lustre of 
Cato. But many of us are deficient in taste and discernment, for we admire the 
Greeks for their antiquity, and what is called their Attic neatness, and yet 
have never noticed the same quality in Cato. This was the distinguishing 
character, say they, of Lysias and Hyperides. I own it, and I admire them for 
it ; but why not allow a share of it to Cato ? They are fond, they tell us, of 
the Attic style of eloquence ; and their choice is certainly judicious, provided 
they do not only copy the dry bones, but imbibe the animal spirits of these 
models. What they recommend, however, is, to do it justice, an agreeable 
quality. But why must Lysias and Hyperides be so fondly admired, while 
Cato is entirely overlooked ? His language indeed has an antiquated air, and 
some of his expressions are rather too harsh and inelegant. But let us remember 
that this was the language of the time ; only change and modernise it, which 
it was not in his power to do ; add the improvements of number and cadence, 
give an easier turn. . . .^ I know, indeed, that he is not sufficiently pol- 
ished, and that recourse must be had to a more perfect model for imitation ; 
for he is an author of such antiquity, that he is the oldest now extant whose 
writings can be read with patience; and the ancients, in general, acquired a 
much greater reputation in every other art than in that of speaking." ' 

There was another reason, however, besides the severity of his 
style, for the neglect of Cato's history by the contemporaries of 
Cicero. If history was prized at Rome by the aristocracy for the 
glory it reflected on their noble houses, there was httle use preserv- 
ing Cato's Origins. For this confirmed enemy of the upper class 
made it a point to omit the names of leaders in describing the 
achievements of Roman arms; and carried his grim humor so far, 
on the other hand, as to preserve for future generations the name 
of an especially fierce elephant which fought bravely in the line of 
battle.4 

We must leave it to more detailed surveys to describe the 
writers who carried the story of Rome down to the last years of 

'Thucydides eclipsed by Theopompus! Cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, 
Sect. 185, with references. 

2 Cicero, Brutus, Chap. XVII. 

2/6Mf.. Chap. XVIII. 

« Cf. Pliny, Naluralis Hisloriae Libri XXXVII, Bk. VIII, Chap. XI; Plutarch, 
Vitae ParaUelae, Chap. XXV (Cato). 



234 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

the repubb'c, writers such as P. Mucius Scaevola, who in 123 B.C. as 
Pontifex Maximus ended the old Annates Maximi, and published 
them ; L. Coelius Antipater the jurist, who broke with the old anna- 
listic style ; thoughtful scholars like Sempronius Asellio, who sought 
in the manner of Polybius to establish the causes of events ; ^ Q. 
Claudius Quadrigarius and the more popular but less critical Valerius 
Antias ; L. Cornelius Sisenna, the historian of the period of Sulla; or 
C. Licinius Macer, whose Annates seem to have been more contro- 
versial than accurate. Although these writers were gratefully used 
by later Latin historians, and above all by Livy,^ so little has been 
left of their works or about them as to render comment a matter 
of minute erudition, out of place in a study like this. Cicero, how- 
ever, viewing history from the standpoint of hterature, offers an 
illuminating comment on Antipater, who wrote at the close of the 
second century. Historians up to that time, says Cicero, were 
simply makers of annals {annatium confectiores) and for him history 
in the proper sense began with Antipater, the first to adorn his tale 
with art or artifice {exornator rerum) instead of being, as his prede- 
cessors were, mere narrators.^ 

L. Coelius Antipater was a distinguished jurist and teacher of 
oratory, who lived a scholarly and retired Ufe. Perhaps owing to 
this retirement he gave up the pragmatic principle and substituted 
for his aim rather that ''pleasure to the ear" (detectare) which 
Thucydides had once denounced but which the followers of Isocrates 
had made the vogue.'* He lacked the restraint and good taste of 
the Greek, however, carrying rhythm to extreme, and introducing 
not only speeches, but also anecdotes and breaking the narrative 
with all kinds of diversions so that the reader should not suffer 
ennui. For instance, instead of giving the figures of Scipio's 
expedition to Africa, he tells us that birds fell from heaven at the 
noise of the shouting soldiers. As Thucydides had done, he chose 

* Vide supra, p. 229, n. 3. 

* Livy cites Antias thirty-five times, Quadrigarius ten times. On the remains of 
these writers see the works of H. Peter quoted above, and Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit.. 
Vol. I, Sects. 155 sqq. 

' " Ceteri non exornatores rerum, sed tantummodo narratores fuerunt." Cicero, 
De Oratore, Bk. 11, Chap. XII. 

*H. Peter's admirable account of Antipater in Wahrheit und Kunst has been 
summarized In this paragraph. 



ROMAN ANNALISTS AND EARLY HISTORIANS 235 

a single war, the second Punic/ as his theme, rather than the whole 
story of Rome. In his preface he tells frankly that he takes it 
from those authors who are deemed reliable,^ meaning Fabius 
Pictor and Cato; there is naturally no trace of Polybius. The 
seven books of this history were used as texts for criticism in the 
days of Cicero's youth, and where rhetoric flourished more than 
history, Antipater flourished with it. Hadrian is said to have pre- 
ferred him to Sallust — the student of Thucydides, the first real 
Roman historian in the eyes of the modern. 

* Belli Punici AUerius Historiae. 

* Ex scriptis eorum qui veri arbitrantur. 



CHAPTER XX 

VARRO, CiESAR AND SALLUST 

If the achievement of Roman historians was disappointing, the 
fault did not lie altogether in a lack of interest about the past, as is 
witnessed by the list of historians of the closing era of the Republic 
which has been given in the last chapter ; and historians were not 
the only ones to contribute antiquarian lore. There were, in 
addition to poets and historians, other scholars as well, at work on 
all kinds of curious investigation, interpreting auguries or the 
archaic hymns of the Salii, studying the history of law or philosophy 
or the etymology of words, or simply writing encyclopaedic surveys 
of things in general. This movement of scholarship forms a notable 
supplement to Roman historiography, reaching as it does aU the 
way from Cato, through Varro, to the elder Pliny. Partly in the 
form of practical manuals, partly in erudite volumes, it preserved a 
mass of data for the learned society of Cicero's day and later ; and 
it helped to satisfy curiosity as to striking events or unusual customs. 
But the essentials of criticism were lacking, — that is, adequate 
tools ; and it need not surprise the reader of this study to find that 
the work of these scholars was, upon the whole, on a lower plane 
than that of the historians. The test of success for the antiquarian 
at Rome seems to have been what it was for the American capitalist 
in the nineteenth century, mere amount of output. Varro, for 
instance, wrote between six and seven hundred volumes. The 
author of so many works could not examine with discerning care 
the sources from which such a vast store of learning was drawn. 
The credulous, uncritical character of Pliny's great Natural History y 
the final summing up of this encyclopaedic historical literature, 
is a fair indication of its inabihty to sort out fact from fiction; 
due to the absence not only of historical discipUnes, but also of 
those of the other sciences which deal with human evolution : the 
sciences of language, philology; of society, anthropology; of 

236 



VARRO, CiESAR AND SALLUST 237 

comparative religion. Yet, inaccurate or not, these collections of 
the data of history were at hand for the Romans to read ; and as 
the reader is generally still less critical than the writer, there 
were probably few who had any idea of how thin the Hne of estab- 
lished fact really was. On the contrary, at least from the day of 
Varro, it must have seemed to them more like an enveloping — if 
hazy — sea, in which only the most expert could find his bearings. 

We should have a better idea of the situation if the works of 
Varro had come down to us in anything like the way in which those 
of Cicero were preserved. But whether it be, as Augustine suggests, 
that the appeal to the lover of words is stronger than that to the 
lover of facts,^ or that the facts ceased to have any meaning by 
themselves, there remain but slight fragments of the many writings 
of Varro. Born in 116 B.C., and therefore Cicero's senior by ten 
years, Varro lived a long and busy life, not as a hermit-scholar, 
but as a man of afifairs, taking an active part in politics ; a some- 
what whimsical man, as his satirical miscellany shows. The only 
work which concerns us, however, is his treatise on Roman Antiq- 
uities, published in 47 b.c. There were twenty-five books dealing 
with human and sixteen with ''divine" antiquities. The data 
were grouped into large sections under Persons, Places, Times and 
Things. There was no attempt to establish their interconnection 
historically, but simply an amassing of curious facts. Strangely 
enough, while the part dealing with human affairs was lost, portions 
of the religious section, the Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum, 
were destined to be passed down to us because of the interest of 
Christian theology in combating the pagan deities. Augustine's 
City of God quoted, in order to ridicule them, Varro's accounts of 
the early cults of Rome. Modern scholarship, correcting Varro in 
places, is upon the whole able to profit better from the data he offers 
than were the Fathers of the Church ; and perhaps, also, better 
than the beheving pagans. To these Varro supplied something 
like a "counterblast" to the negative criticism of Lucretius,^ and 
helped to restore that emphasis upon the good old Roman virtue 
of pietas, upon which the Vergilian epic was so strongly to insist. 

But however much this work of Varro may have served its pur- 

1 Cf. De Civitate Dei, Bk. VI, Chap. II. 

* J. Wight DuflF, A Literary History of Rome (2d ed., 1910), p. 338. 



238 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

pose, we find in the attitude of Cicero towards him, an indication 
that those days were strangely like our own ; that literary men 
sometimes did not read the works of scholars. Cicero did not quote 
Varro, whose works were not to be found in his library. His 
friend, Atticus, the book-publisher and author, had them, however, 
and urged Cicero to use them ; but when Cicero and Varro both 
made their peace with Caesar and returned to their hterary pur- 
suits, Cicero's letters to Varro are still general and somewhat 
formal.^ Even under the stress of having to exchange dedications 
to some of their works, the mutual regard of scholar and man of 
letters is none too cordial. 

This is all the more evident when one turns to the Uttle manual 
on the history of eloquence which Cicero wrote at this time, under 
the title Brutus. The book itself is of interest to us, for it is the 
nearest to history of Cicero's writings. It passes in review about 
two hundred orators, Greek and Roman, but all in the form of a 
pleasant dialogue, suitably held under the statue of Plato on a 
quiet lawn, by Brutus, Atticus and Cicero. But the incident with 
which it opens is most significant. Atticus had written a short, 
general outhne of universal history. From all that we can gather, 
it was a poor enough affair, an annal based, like that of his pred- 
ecessor Cornelius Nepos,^ upon the Athenian chronicle of Apollo- 
dorus, and hence in the direct line that leads through Eusebius, 
to Christian monastic annals. But it got away from the beaten 
path of purely Roman antiquities and presented the world as one ; 
and perhaps its very slightness combined with its extended perspec- 
tives constituted its chief charm. There is no subtler appeal to 
our intellectual amour propre than to have great and difiicult truths 
in science or philosophy made obvious by keeping us unaware of 
the difficulties. In any case Cicero hails this manual with lyric 
joy ; it has restored his drooping spirits and made life worth living 
in these dark days ; it opens out the obscurities of the past to the 
daylight and furnishes a sure guide where all was so confused ! 
In short, Atticus' outlines have done for Cicero what H. G. Wells' 

^ Cf. E. G. Sihler, Cicero of Arpinum (1914), pp. 249, 334. This is a suggestive 
book, crowded with facts, but hard to follow. 

* Atticus' chronicle was written about 47 B.C., that of Cornelius Nepos about 
63 B.C. On Apollodorus see above, p. 50, n. i. 



VARRO, C^SAR AND SALLUST 239 

Outline has done for the modern busy reader, led him to that "peak 
in Darien" where he might discover the expanse of Time, not so 
much with the shock of wild surmise, as with the comfortable 
assurance that he already had the chart for its exploration. The 
significance of the incident is not that Atticus had written a manual 
of general history, but that Cicero needed it so badly. 

Reference to this general history naturally recalls at this point 
the works of the later Greek historians described above, and we 
may perhaps anticipate here enough to mention the one attempt 
to carry over into Latin the scheme for universal history, which we 
met first in Ephorus and Theopompus. Pompeius Trogus, the 
younger contemporary of Livy, covered the history of the near 
East in forty-four books, beginning with Ninus and including the 
Macedonian Empire. The title of the work, Historiae Philippicae, 
sufficiently indicates the Greek point of view, for the culminating 
figure was Philip of Macedon. Rome came in only incidentally, 
and rather as seen by her enemies. This was not the kind of history 
to rival Livy ; and it would have perished utterly had not a certain 
M. Junianus Justinus made a synopsis of it which was destined 
largely to satisfy the meagre curiosity of the Middle Ages in the 
great story of the pagan world. For it was to this that Orosius, 
the pupil of Augustine, mainly turned for his materials when 
writing that story of the sufferings of the pre-Christian era which 
was the historical counterpart to the City of God} 

Consideration of works like these has carried us somewhat 
afield from the main hnes of Roman historiography. But before 
we proceed to the first of the great historians of Rome, Sallust, 
whose figure already stands before us, we must pause for a moment 
more to consider the historical writings of another class, not 
scholars this time but men of action. 

For in the controversial atmosphere of late republican politics 
most statesmen who could write left narratives to justify their 
conduct, and those who could not write them themselves employed 
others to do so. The dictator Sulla (138-78 B.C.) after his retire- 
ment from public Hfe wrote an autobiography, which seems to have 
resembled the semi^fabulous narrative of an Oriental rather than 
of a sober Roman; for it points to a series of miraculous occur- 

* Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri Septem. 



240 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

rences coincident with his public work to show that the hand of 
the goddess Tyche was visible throughout.^ Yet such a narrative 
could impose upon Plutarch. Lucullus also (114-57 ^-C-) early 
in life wrote a history of the war with Marius ; but the use of current 
narrative as apologetic pamphlet literature reached its height in 
the last years of the Republic, when Pompey on the one side and 
Caesar on the other, defended their actions at the bar of history. 
Pompey did not plead himself, but maintained a "literary staff "^ 
to present his story in the light of hero-worship. For this purpose 
slaves or Greeks were best ; and Theophanes of Mytilene described 
the third Mithridatic War as a repetition of the conquest of Asia 
by Alexander, repeating the hero-myth even down to a conflict 
with Amazons.^ 

It is only when we turn from nonsense like this to Caesar's 
Commentaries that we suddenly realize the full measure of achieve- 
ment of these war-memoirs.^ Few books, however great, can 
stand the test of use in school and still retain a hold upon us in 
later life, and it was a questionable gain to Caesar that he wrote 
in such simple, lucid phrase as to make his works the object of the 
desolating struggles of the young with Latin prose. But if one does, 
by any chance, go back to Caesar after years of absence from the 
schoolroom, one finds a surprise awaiting him. For these works, 
written primarily to justify himself before the Roman people, 
dictated in camp and in the midst of the world's affairs, contain 
not a word of open eulogy of the author, and present the narrative 
as if from an impersonal observer, interested not only in the war 
but in the manners and the customs of peoples ; in short a detached, 
objective account such as Thucydides himself might approve. 
This is the external, however; for so happily is the illusion of 

^ It bore the title Commentarii Rerum Gestarum. 

* The expression used by H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 323. See also his 
Die geschlchtliche Litteratur iiber die romische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre 
Quellen, Vol. I, pp. 163 sqq. Varro wrott for Pompey. 

3 The use of slaves or f reedmen to exalt the fortunes of the great was common in 
Rome as elsewhere. But none of the achievement is notable enough to come within 
this survey. 

* Caesar's Commentarii are ostensibly merely "sketches" for a history, to be 
written later ; but this was partly a stylistic self-depreciation, recognizable among 
the rhetorical devices of the day. Cicero wrote the account of his consulate in the 
same vein. 



VARRO, C^SAR AND SALLUST 241 

impartiality maintained that it is only when one has read the story 
through that one realizes the possibiUty of another point of view. 
It was a work of genius to use the quality of self-restraint to increase 
the impression of reality, and so, after all, to make what was left out 
speak for the writer. 

For the ten or eleven years following the murder of Julius 
Caesar in 44 B.C. there was living in retirement, in his luxurious 
villa on the Quirinal, the first really great historian whom Rome 
produced, Gains Sallustius Crispus, knowti to us as Sallust. He 
had been a partisan of Caesar, and his great wealth, which showed 
itself in the elaborate gardens Qiorti Sallustiani) which he laid 
out on the northern hillsides of the city, was probably partly due 
to his having held the governorship of the province of Numidia 
for a while after Caesar's victories. But during the hot factional 
fights and the civil wars of the period of the Triumvirate and the 
founding of the imperial Principate of Augustus, he withdrew from 
present politics to devote himself to a narrative of those of the age 
which had just passed away. 

Such a course of action needed, in the eyes of a practical Roman, 
some apology, and the two works of Sallust which have come 
to us begin with such apologies. Since they supply the point of 
view from which he wished us to judge of his performance, we may 
first listen to what he has to say on the matter. The third and 
fourth chapters of the Conspiracy of Catiline run as follows : ^ 

" It is a fine thing to serve the State by action, nor is eloquence despicable. 
Men may become illustrious alike in peace and war, and many by their 
own acts, many by their record of the acts of others, win applause. The 
glory which attends the doer and the recorder of brave deeds is certainly by 
no means equal. For my own part, however, I count historical narration as 
one of the hardest of tasks. In the first place, a full equivalent has to be found 
in words for the deeds narrated, and in the second the historian's censures of 
crimes are by many thought to be the utterances of ill-will and envy, while 
his record of the high virtue and glory of the good, tranquilly accepted so long 
as it deals with what th reader deems to be easily within his own powers, 
so soon as it passes beyond this is disbelieved as mere invention. 

" As regards myself, my inclination originally led me, like many others, 
while still a youth, into public hfe. There I found many things against me. 

* The Catiline of Sallust {The Conspiracy of Catiline), English translation by 
A. W. Pollard (1886 ; 2d ed., 1891 ; reprinted 1913). 



242 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Modesty, temperance, and merit had departed, and hardihood, corruption, 
and avarice were flourishing in their stead. My mind, a stranger to bad 
acquirements, contemned these quahties;^ nevertheless, with the weakness 
of my youth, I was seized and held amid this throng of vices by ambition. I 
presented a contrast to the ill behaviour of my fellows, none the less I was 
tormented by the same craving for the honours of ofl5ce, and the same 
sensitiveness to popularity and unpopularity as the rest. 

" At last, after many miseries and perils, my mind was at peace, and I de- 
termined to pass the remainder of my days at a distance from pubUc affairs. 
It was not, however, my plan to waste this honourable leisure in idleness and 
sloth, nor yet to spend my life in devotion to such slavish tastes as agriculture 
or hunting. I returned to the studies I had once begun, from which my un- 
happy ambition had held me back, and determined to narrate the history of 
the Roman people in separate essays, wherever it seemed worthy of record. 
I was the more incUned to this by the fact that my mind was free alike from 
the hopes and fears of the political partisan." 

In his other book, The Jugurthine War,^ Sallust is even more on 

the defensive : 

" Among the tasks that occupy the intellect, historical narration holds 
a prominent and useful place. As its merits have been often extolled, I think 
it best to leave them unmentioned, and thus escape any imputation of arro- 
gantly exalting myself by praise of my own piirsuit. And yet I have no doubt 
that there will be some who, because I have determined to pass my life at 
a distance from public affairs, will apply the name of indolence to my long and 
useful task. At any rate, the men to whom it seems the height of energy to 
court the mob, and buy favour by their pubUc entertainments, will do so." 

In both these sections his defence involves a characterization 
of the poUtics of Rome — the other alternative field for his activity 
— which is, in a word, the essence of his history as well. For he 
dealt as a historian with just that corrupt and vicious political life 
of the closing years of the Repubhc, from which he sought refuge 
in the poUte society of his friends and the delights of intellectual 
intercourse. The choice of the conspiracy of Catiline for a subject 
to be immortahzed, reveaUng — as it did in his depiction — the 
degradation of Roman ideals and the failure of its social as well as 
of its political system, was typical of his outlook. The story of the 
war against Jugurtha, his other theme, has a constantly recurring 

1 Sallust's life, before his retirement, by no means escaped criticism ; but we arc 
not concerned here with questions of private morals. 

2 Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum, Chap. IV. 



VARRO, C^SAR AND SALLUST 243 

note as to the venality of Roman senators, and if we lose the thread 
of home affairs in the graphic — though sometimes fanciful — descrip- 
tions of battle in the wilds of Numidia, the climax of the tale is less 
the fate of Jugurtha than that striking passage which closed the 
disreputable manoeuvres of the king and his partisans in Rome, 
in which, as he was leaving the city, "he is said, after looking back 
at it in silence, at last to have cried : * a city for sale, soon to fall if 
once it find a buyer.' " ^ There is no wonder that in dealing with 
characters and events such as these Sallust should find history 
difficult. 

But the difficulty was enhanced by the fact that he never quite 
saw the perspective as a historian. He was intent upon preserving 
"the memory of gallant deeds that kindled a fire in the breasts of 
brave men, that cannot be quenched until their own merit has 
rivalled their ancestors' fame and renown," ^ and so he sought to 
bring out, partly by contrast, against that dark background, the 
patriotism of a Cato or the military genius of a Metellus. Yet he 
was too much of a historian to do this at the expense of the narrative 
as a whole ; the episodes are not allowed to dominate as they would 
in the case of a mere writer of memoirs. The attempt to be im- 
partial prevents him from that brilliant sort of sketching which 
would have distorted the narrative for the sake of a few strong 
effects. On the other hand, the background never becomes really 
clear. He did not set himself, in these works at least, the larger 
theme, of which they furnished the notable illustrations, — the 
theme of Roman government in the days when an outworn oligarchy 
was attempting to rule through an outworn constitution, and the 
democratic statesmen had not yet found their Caesar. 

If, therefore, there is something inherently weak about the work 
of Sallust, why is it held in such high regard ? For, not only have 
we the praise of the one most competent to pass judgment in Rome, 
Tacitus himself,^ but modern critics are agreed that Sallust stands 
head and shoulders above his predecessors, and remains, with Livy 
and Tacitus, one of the three really great Latin historians. The 
reason is mainly that he applied to Rome the standards of Thu- 
cydides and Polybius, whom he took as his masters ; and, cutting 

^Ibid., Chap. XXXV. Ubid.,Chaip.TV. 

' Tacitus, Annates, Bk. Ill, Chap. XXX. 



244 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

adrift from the current of complacent rhetorical compositions, 
honestly tried to tell the truth. Moreover, in style as well as in 
content, he held himself aloof from the florid or oratorical traditions 
and wrote with dignity and gave a certain fitting, archaic flavor 
to his narrative.^ Like Thucydides, he polished and repolished his 
phrases; and the speeches he introduced, even when he had the 
text before him,^ were rewritten in keeping with the rest of his 
work. Fortunately one orator, Cicero, saved him the trouble of so 
doing with his particular orations, by rewriting and polishing them 
for posterity himself. 

It is generally held that one of Sallust's chief merits is his 
depiction of character ; and it is true that his characters are for the 
most part drawn with real impartiahty and are life-like. But the 
qualities assigned them seem to smack a little of formula ; they are 
not subtle combinations of temperament and capacity, capable 
of swiftly surprising the reader, but share that element of the 
commonplace which makes so much of antique literature seem more 
or less like stage-property.^ However, it is open to the classicist 
to take exception to this, for the full merit and charm of Sallust's 
art demand more time and study than his subject-matter makes 
otherwise profitable. 

Finally, there are two frank weaknesses in Sallust as a historian. 
In the first place he is weak in chronology and geography. His 
editors have all pointed out how incredibly careless he is in both 
respects. He uses vague phrases for lapse of time and even then 
gets hopelessly wrong, while his geography of Africa is a fanciful 
bit of writing, such as putting cities near the coast that should 
be forty miles inland. This would have shocked Polybius, 
and if Sallust found Thucydides vague in his time-reckoning, 
Thucydides would have never failed, as Sallust did, where the data 
were at hand. 

* A good example of a deftly turned phrase, even were it not original, is the crisp 
comment on the Numidians who were "protected rather by their feet than by their 
swords" (Bellutn Jugurthinum, Chap. LXXIV). 

* As for instance that of Cato against Catiline or Memmius against Jugurtha. 
His speeches are admittedly well done, and if there are too many for us, and the 
moralizing is overdone, they suited the age for which they were written. 

3 The portrait of Marius is perhaps an exception. CJ. Sallust, Bellum Jugurthi- 
num, Chap. LXIII et seq. 



VARRO, CiESAR AND SALLUST 245 

The second weakness of Sallust came from his very advantages. 
A retired capitalist, living in elegant ease, employing scholars to 
do the drudgery of research,^ he missed some of that keen sense of 
the value of accuracy which comes from constantly feeling the 
iron discipline of the scientific method. But, more than this, he 
saw the world much as such a one would today, through the 
windows of a Pall Mall or Fifth Avenue club. His philosophy, 
which he outlines in his prefaces, is one of self-denial, but it is the 
kind of self-denial that goes with club-life. It reminds one of 
Polonius. It does not reach out to grapple with the real problems 
of a work-a-day world. It is placid and sure of itself, properly 
censorious, but lacking in grasp of fundamentals. 

If SaUust's other work, a history of the whole era just preceding 
his own, was ever finished or not,^ we have traces of only a few 
fragments ; and the fact that he proposed to concentrate on certain 
main features, as a rule for historical composition, leads us to sur- 
mise that his performance in the larger task was hardly one to cause 
us to revise our judgment upon him. Yet he may have suffered 
from the fact that in the ages that followed, particularly in the 
closing period of imperial history, it was the charm of his style 
and the power of his portrayal which preserved for us what it 
did, rather than any more solid merit in historical synthesis. 

* He employed scholars to do the "grubbing" for him. Suetonius, De Illustribus 
Grammaticis, Chap. X. Yet he should get due credit for recognizing the value of 
scholarly aids. " Such pains were seldom taken by a Latin historian." Cf. J. W. 
Mackail, Latin Literature (1895 ; reprinted 1907), p. 84. 

^ It bore the title Hisioriae, and apparently covered from about 78 to 66 B.C., 
continuing where L. Cornelius Sisenna had left off. Vide Teuffel-Schwabe, op. 
cit., Vol. I, Sect. 205, n. 4. On Sisenna see H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 301. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The philological work of Varro has been brought out by G. Goetz and 
F. Schoell, De Lingua Latina Quae Supersunt (Teubner, 1910) ; but the student 
of history should consult H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae (2 vols., 
1906-1914), Vol. II, for the fragments which are of historiographical interest. 
For bibliography see J ahresbericht uber die Fortschritte der klassischen Alter- 
tutnswissenschaft, Vol. CXLIII (1910), pp. 63 sqq., for 1898-1908; Sup. Vol. 
CLXV (1913), PP- 307 sqq.; Vol. CLXXIII (1915), p. 91; Vol. CLXXVII 
(1916-1918), pp. 89 sq., p. 254. 

There are editions of Caesar's Commentarii by B. Kiibler (3 vols., ed. maior, 



246 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Teubner, 1893-1897 ; ed. minor, Teubner, 1897-1911); E. Hoffmann (2 vols., 
3d ed., 1898) ; B. Dinter (3 vols., Teubner, 1864, 1890) ; T. R. Holmes (1914) ; 
E. S. Shuckburgh (1912-1915); R. Du Pontet (Oxford Library of Classical 
Authors, 2 vols. [1900-1901]). There is a large literature on Caesar but the 
translations of The Gallic War byH, J. Edwards (1917), The Civil Wars by 
A. G. Peskett (1914), in the Loeb Classical Library and the works of T. R. 
Holmes, Ancient Britain and the Invasion of Julius Ccesar (1907), CcBsar's 
Conquest of Gaul (2d ed., 191 1), will furnish the best introduction. See also 
E. G. Sihler, Annals of Ccesar (191 1). For general literature see Jakresbericht, 
etc.. Sup. Vol. CLVI (191 2), pp. 168 sqq. 

Of the various editions of Sallust the following may be mentioned : T. Opitz 
(2d ed., Teubner, 1909) ; A. Eussner {Catilina, De Bella Jugurthino, Teubner 
1887 ; new ed., 191 2) ; J. H. Schmalz {Catilina, 8th ed., 1909 ; De Bello Jugur- 
thino, 8ih ed., 1912); C. Stegmann (Catilina, Teubner, 4th ed., 1914; De 
Bello Jugurthino, Teubner, 3d ed., 1915). There are translations by A. W. 
Pollard, The Catiline of Sallust (1886; 2d ed., 1891, reprinted 1913), and by 
J. C. Rolf e, 5o//m5/ .... (192 1), in the Loeb Classical Library. The bibhog- 
raphies in the Jahresbericht, etc., are in Vol. CLX (191 2), p. 64; Sup. Vol. 
CLXV (1913), pp. 165 sqq.; Vol. CLXXVII (1916-1918), pp. 84, 248. 



CHAPTER XXI 

LIVY 

Whatever opinions one may have as to the place of Sallust 
among historians, that of Livy remains unchallenged. He was 
the national historian of Rome; the only one who successfully 
handled the long and intricate story of war and politics from the 
establishment of the City to that of the Empire. Others worked 
at portions ; he took over the whole. Even in mere size his history 
was monumental. It had no less than one hundred forty-two 
books ; and a book in Livy is not like the meagre divisions of 
Caesar's Commentaries ; it is a small work in itself. But apart 
from its vastness, the conception which underlay the history of Livy 
was so consistently developed, the outlines of his structure so clear 
and so harmonious, that it is hardly too much to say that it was the 
impress which he gave to the history of the Republic that lasted 
down to the day of Niebuhr and the nineteenth century critics. He 
carried the idea of the fated mission of Rome as the unifying centre 
of the civiUzed world back across the centuries of its obscurity, and 
linked together past, present and future in one culminating perspec- 
tive. In a sense it was merely the reflection in history of the greatness 
of the writer's own times. But the fact that those times were great 
made the faith in Rome itself, — which was Livy's creed, — almost 
the same as a behef in human progress or a vital interest in organized 
society. Thus his patriotism became cathoUc, and remained an 
inspiration to succeeding ages, even after the Roman world had 
passed away.* Whatever criticism may have to say as to his 
methods of work, it cannot shake the place of Livy as one of those 
few historians whose works have hved rather than endured. Judged 

* Cf. A. Molinier, Les sources de I'histoire de France, Vol. I, p. 36, for the influence 
of Livy's perspective upon the historical ideas of the Middle Ages. This influence, 
however, was rather indirect, while from the days of the humanists to our own Livy 
has again his place among "the classics." 

247 



248 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

in this light, the national historian of Rome stands high among the 
old masters. 

Titus Livius (59 B.C.-17 a.d.) was bom at Padua, but passed 
most of his life at Rome, and wrote under the direct patronage of 
Augustus, Indeed, he represented in history that effort toward 
reform in morals, in which Augustus was so much concerned, by 
the strong emphasis which he placed upon the ancient virtues and 
the depiction of heroic acts and patriotic sacrifice.^ But the very 
sincerity of character, which revealed itself in this moral attitude of 
Livy, kept him independent in spirit, so that although at court he 
was no courtier. He did not, like Horace and Vergil, place Augustus 
among the gods, and indeed only mentioned him incidentally, 
"once to mark a date, again to prove a fact." ^ On the other hand, 
he ventured to praise Brutus and Cassius.^ A sturdy provincial, 
without any of the ties that made partisanship a family virtue, he 
came to Rome just when the hot feuds of the latter Republic were 
quenched in the great civil wars, and the era of corruption and 
intrigue which obscured the perspectives of Sallust was apparently 
over. Consequently, without surrendering his republican principles, 
he could see in the Principate a continuation of these elements 
in the Roman past which made for greatness. But while his 
character and outlook are clearly shown in his works and in the few 
references we have concerning his life, those references are so few 
that, as in the case of Herodotus, we are left with a history rather 
than a historian. As Taine has somewhat sententiously summed 
it up : "A date in Eusebius, some details scattered in Seneca and 
Quintilian, two words thrown by chance in his own work; that is 
all that is left us on the life of Titus Livius. The historian of 
Rome has no history." ^ The fragments we have show him to 
have been modest in the midst of his vast popularity;^ his work 

* Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 352. 

* H. Taine, Essai sur Tite Live (1856), p. 6. 

» Cf. Tacitus, Annates, Bk. IV, Chap. XXXIV. 

* H. Taine, Essai sur Tite Live, p. i. 

**The younger Pliny tells us a striking story, apparently current in his day, 
which sufficiently indicates the contemporary fame of Livy. " Have you never read 
(he says to Nep)Os) about a certain man from Cadiz, who came from the very end of 
the world to see Livy, moved thereto by the latter's name and fame, and immediately 
after seeing him went back home again? " Cf. Epistula, Bk. II, Letter 3. 



LIVY 249 

reveals the fact that he travelled little and read much ; and his 
style bears the marks of the training of a rhetor. In other words 
he was a cultured gentleman of studious habits. Beyond that we 
can hardly go. 

When we turn from the man to the history, we may as well 
begin at the beginning and let Livy describe his purpose and his 
conception of the work, as he does, frankly enough, in the Preface 
to the Ab Urbe Condita: 

" Whether the task I have undertaken of writing a complete history of the 
Roman people from the very commencement of its existence will reward me 
for the labour spent on it, I neither know for certain, nor if I did know would 
I venture to say. For I see that this is an old-established and a common 
practice, each fresh writer being invariably persuaded that he will either attain 
greater certainty in the materials of his narrative or surpass the rudeness of 
antiquity in the excellence of his style. 

" However this may be, it will still be a great satisfaction to me to have 
taken my part, too, in investing, to the utmost of my abilities, the ajinals of 
the foremost nation in the world with a deeper interest ; and if in such a crowd 
of writers my own reputation is thrown into the shade, I would console myself 
with the renown and greatness of those who eclipse my fame. 

" The subject moreover is one that demands immense labour. It goes back 
beyond 700 years, and, starting from small and humble beginnings, has grown 
to such dimensions that it begins to be overburdened by its greatness. I have 
very little doubt, too, that for the majority of my readers, the earliest times 
and those immediately succeeding will possess little attraction; they will 
hurry on to those modern days in which the might of a long paramount nation 
is wasting by internal decay. I, on the other hand, shall look for a further 
reward of my labours in being able to close my eyes to the evils which our 
generation has witnessed for so many years ; so long, at least, as I am devoting 
all my thoughts to retracing those pristine records, free from all the anxiety 
which can disturb the historian of his own times even if it cannot warp him 
from the truth. 

" The traditions of what happened prior to the foundation of the City, or 
whilst it was being built, are more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than 
the authentic records of the historian, and I have no intention of establishing 
either their truth or their falsehood. This much licence is conceded to the 
ancients, that by intermingling hvmian actions with divine they may confer 
a more august dignity on the origins of states. Now, if any nation ought to 
be allowed to claim a sacred origin and point back to divine paternity, that 
nation is Rome. For such is her renown in war that when she chooses to 
represent Mars as her own and her foimder's father, the nations of the world 
accept the statement with the same equanimity with which they accept her 
dominion. 



25© INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

" But whatever opinions may be formed or criticisms passed upon these and 
similar traditions, I regard them as of small importance. The subjects to 
which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are 
these — the life and morals of the community ; the men and the qualities by 
which, through domestic poUcy and foreign war, dominion was won and ex- 
tended. Then, as the standard of morahty gradually lowers, let him follow 
the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then 
slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into head- 
long ruin, until he reaches those days in which we can bear neither our diseases 
nor their remedies. 

" There is this exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived 
from the study of the past, that you see, set in the clear hght of historical truth, 
examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself 
and your country what to imitate, and what, as being mischievous in its in- 
ception and disastrous in its issue, you are to avoid. Unless, however, I am 
misled by affection for my undertaking, there has never existed any common- 
wealth greater in power, with a purer morality, or more fertile in good examples ; 
or any state in which avarice and luxury have been so late in making their 
inroads, or poverty and frugality so highly and continuously honoured, showing 
so clearly that the less wealth men possessed the less they coveted. In these 
latter years wealth has brought avarice in its train, and the unlimited command 
of pleasure has created in men a passion for ruining themselves and everything 
else through self-indulgence and licentiousness. 

" But criticisms which will be unwelcome, even when perhaps necessary, 
must not appear in the commencement, at all events, of this extensive work. 
We should much prefer to start with favourable omens, and if we could have 
adopted the poets' custom, it would have been much pleasanter to commence 
with prayers and supplications to gods and goddesses that they would grant 
a favourable and successful issue to the great task before us." * 

Nowhere else in antique historiography have we so winning 
an appeal. It has the personal note of Polybius without his 
pedagogical airs, the moral atmosphere of Sallust but not his 
censorious declamation, and a promise of the charm of a Herodotus 
in the logi about old, forgotten things that take the mind off the 
sordid cares of the present. The hght touch which brings one 
at the close to the borderland that hes between humor and poetry, 
shows at once the sure hand of a master. The omens are favorable 
when the historian has in mind the frailties of his readers to the point 

^ Translation by W. M. Roberts in the edition of Livy in Everyman's Library 
(3 vols., 1912). The translator has succeeded in giving the sense of Livy's ease of 
style but hardly his compression. The Latin is about half the length of the English. 



LIVY 251 

of not recalling them unduly, but can leave the heroic past to 
convey its own lesson. 

The history of Livy bore the simple title, From the Foundation 
oj the City {Ab UrbeCondita), and it properly begins with ^neas, 
whose deeds are hurriedly sketched on the basis of the "generally 
accepted" legend.^ There is Uttle indication of enthusiasm for 
this or the story of Romulus which follows. There is even a rising 
doubt as to the divine paternity of the founder of Rome and a 
naturalistic alternative to the tales about him. Indeed, the nar- 
rative hardly gets under way in the legends of origin. It is not 
until we have the struggle of Rome against Alba Longa, culminating 
in the dramatic duel of the three Horatii against the Curiatii,^ 
that we are conscious of the swing of unfettered movement and the 
play of the historical imagination. The problem of origins is left 
unsolved ; the case is given away to neither the credulous nor the 
skeptical; details hardly matter; for in any case, says Livy, "in 
my opinion, the origin of so great a city and the establishment of 
an empire next in power to that of the gods was due to the Fates." ^ 

This at once suggests the phase of Livy's history which is most 
open to question in our eyes. It is so religious in tone as to be 
frankly mediaeval in the inclusion of the supernatural as an in- 
trinsic part of the human story, and especially in the handling of 
crises, when by miracle or portent the gods reveal themselves. 
Omens and prodigies abound ; when the gods are not on the scene 
they are just behind it. Herodotus by comparison is almost 
modern, for, although the oracles play a great part in his narrative, 
the gods remain aloof. Livy, on the contrary, in the spirit of 
Augustus' religious reforms,^ made piety the very core of patriotism. 
There is a flavor of Stoic doctrine, as Pelham points out, in the way 
in which Fate " disposes the plans of men,^ and blinds their 
minds,^ yet leaves their wills free." ^ But the philosopher yields 

• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. I, Chap. I. The division into books is by the 
author {cf. Bk. VI, Chap. I, i) ; that into decades or sets of ten books is a later device. 

2 Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XXV. » jf^d., Bk. I, Chap. IV. 

* Cf. ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XIX. 
6/W<i., Bk. I, Chap. XLII. 

« Ibid., Bk. V, Chap. XXXVII. 

» Ibid., Bk. XXXVII, Chap. XLV; H. F. Pelham, article Livy, in Encyclopadia 
Britannica. 



252 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

to the historian, as he relates the narratives, in the way he finds 
them in his sources, and realizes how fuUy his characters believed 
in all the apparatus of official magic, and the uncanny presences that 
heralded disaster or victory. In a sentence which is practically un- 
matched in antique history for penetrating historical imagination, 
he admits the influence which the old faiths exert over him as he 
sinks himself into the past and learns to think and feel the way 
his ancient heroes did. **In narrating ancient things," he says, 
"my soul, I know not how, becomes antique, and when I see 
men so wise treat these events as affairs of state, I have scruples 
at finding them unworthy my annals." ^ This is certainly the 
most that can be said in his defence. If the gods reveal the 
future, as they do in the instance which calls forth this aside, 
they are moving in the pages of Livy as they did through the 
brains of his heroes, and to that degree the supernatural is the 
more natural history. 

The story of Rome was one of constant war, and Livy is at his 
best describing campaigns and battle scenes. A man of letters 
and not a soldier himself, he is deficient in military science and 
inaccurate in geography ,2 and his sense of numbers is poor ; yet 
his narrative of action is nervous, swift and forceful. While in 
argumentative sections his style is often involved and some- 
times drags, here he has the art of securing speed and yet combining 
it with the picturesque. The only thing that spoils his best portions 
is the chance that he will interrupt them to insert just such an argu- 
ment in the shape of interminable speeches or harangues. These 
were undoubtedly, in Livy's eyes, the high points of his art; for 
the influence of Isocrates, or at least of that form of rhetoric which 
Romans most admired, was dominant in his style. There are over 
four hundred speeches in the thirty-five books which have come 
down to us, and they were adjudged, by no less a critic than Quin- 
tilian, to be unsurpassed in diction and content.^ It must be ad- 
mitted, indeed, that they are not vapid declamations but real, 
characteristic speeches ; but they are often long and labored. 

1 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. XLIII, Chap. XIII. 

2 His battle scenes do not work out on the actual map. Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit 
und Kunst, p. 356. 

3 H. Peter, op. cit., p. 356. 



LIVY 



253 



It was not the speeches which Livy feared might drive readers 
away, but the long succession of the wars themselves. After ten 
books of them he is moved to exhort the tired reader to continue 
as a patriotic task : 

" What sort of a man must he be who woxild find the long story of those wars 
tedious, though he is only narrating or reading it, when they failed to wear out 
those who were actually engaged in them? " * 

In this apprehension Livy was justified. It was the greatest 
tribute to his genius that antiquity preserved, well into the Middle 
Ages, so vast a repertory of archaic wars. If only relatively small 
portions of the great work have come down to us,^ it was not until 
those dark ages after the seventh century that the missing books 
disappeared, and even some parts of them are preserved in extracts 
by later authors. Why the long story of obscure struggles was 
preserved when so much more important parts were lost is of course 
impossible to say ; but perhaps the historian's love for those quaint, 
far-off days had something to do in preserving them. 

When we turn from the art of Livy to his criticism and use of 
sources, we at once come upon his weakness. Criticism was con- 
trary to his nature. He was a narrator. He gives one the im- 
pression that he used criticism only superficially and because it 
was the fashion.^ He did not discriminate among his sources, but 
took what best fitted with the scheme of the story. Pictor and 
Polybius ^ were used, but not consistently. Second-hand annalists 
were good enough so long as they contained the data. While 
hardly going so far as to apply the adage se non e vero e ben trovato, 
Livy did not interest himself in those researches in either philology 
or antiquarian lore which the new scholarship of his day had made 
available. It is enough to say that he shows no trace of having 
read Varro.^ 

There are, however, signs of the distinct sense of dependence 

» Bk. X, Chap. XXXI. Cf. also Bk. VI, Chap. XII, "I have no doubt that my 
readers will be tired of such a long record of incessant wars with the Volscians." 

* The extant books are I-X, XXI-XLV, of which XLI and XLIII are incomplete. 
' H. Peter, op. cit., p. 356. 

* Polybius was used for the Greek and Oriental history in the thirtieth book ; 
but he had nothing so good for Rome. Vide W. Soltau, Livius' Geschichtswerk, seine 
Komposition und seine Quellen (1897). 

' Cf. H. F. Pelham, article Livy, in Encydopcedia Brilannica. 



254 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

upon the sources which he found available. The most notable 
is the difference in tone after the narrative of the burning of the 
city by the Gauls. The sixth book, which begins the new era, 
starts as follows. 

" The history of the Romans from the foundation of the City to its capture, 
. . . has been set forth in the five preceding books. The subject-matter is 
enveloped in obscurity; partly from its great antiquity, like remote objects 
which are hardly discernible through the vastness of the distance; partly 
owing to the fact that written records, which form the only trustworthy me- 
morials of events, were in those times few and scanty, and even what did exist 
in the pontifical commentaries and public and private archives nearly all 
perished in the conflagration of the City. Starting from the second beginnings 
of the City, which, like a plant cut to its roots, sprang up in greater beauty and 
fruitfulness, the details of its history both civil and military will now be ex- 
hibited in their proper order, with greater clearness and certainty."^ 

The promise in these latter lines was made good rather in a 
literary than in a scholarly sense. Where all his authorities agree, 
he is happy ;^ where they disagree he is without any principles 
of criticism to guide him. An interesting instance of this is in 
a passage to which reference has already been made. After stating 
that his readers will doubtless tire of his Volscians, he goes on to say : 

" But they will also be struck with the same difficulty which I have myself 
felt whilst examining the authorities who lived nearer to the period, namely, 
from what source did the Volscians obtain sufficient soldiers after so many 
defeats? Since this point has been passed over by the ancient writers, what 
can I do more than express an opinion, such as anyone may form from his own 
inferences? " ^ 

The point to be noted is that Livy does not dream of ques- 
tioning the fact of the great size of the Volscian army, in view 
of the agreement of his authorities. He can only turn aside to 
theories which may help to rationalize the account so as to 
make it more credible. The modern historian must first do what 
Livy seems not to have done at all, determine the relation of his 
various sources one to the other. 

If Livy was not a scholarly historian, neither was he qualified 

> Livy, Ab Urhe Condita, Bk. VI, Chap. I. 

» Ibid., Bk. IV, Chap. XX ; Bk. VIH, Chap. VI; Bk. VI, Chap. XH. 

» Ibid., Bk. VI, Chap. XII. 



LIVY 2SS 

by that experience in practical affairs which Polybius preferred to 
scholarship. His failure to see the value of that wider knowledge 
of men and places shows itself not only in his lack of exactness 
in geography, to which reference has been made, but it narrows 
as well his view of history and of Rome. As Pelham has so ably 
put it, "With Polybius, the greatness of Rome is a phenomenon 
to be critically studied and scientifically explained; the rise of 
Rome forms an important chapter in universal history, that must 
be dealt with, not as an isolated fact, but in connexion with the 
general march of events in the civilized world. . . . Livy writes 
as a Roman, to raise a monument worthy the greatness of Rome, 
and to keep alive, for the guidance and the warning of Romans, 
the recollection alike of the virtues which had made Rome great 
and of the vices which had threatened her with destruction." ^ 

Livy's history is, therefore, intensely patriotic. Rome was 
always in the right. Its rise was due to the sterling virtues of the 
good old days ; above all, to piety. The fathers of the Republic 
are men of courage and firmness, and of unshaken faith in the great- 
ness of their destiny. Fortunately, these are virtues of general 
application, and however inadequate they may be as an explanation 
of the Roman triumph, they offered to subsequent moralists much 
inspiration to apply the lessons elsewhere. It is only in our own 
day that civic virtues have ceased to be impressed upon the young 
by the model supphed from the pages of the classics. And it is 
sufl5cient tribute to Livy in this regard to recall that he was the one 
writer of antiquity singled out by that clearest political thinker of 
the humanistic era, Machiavelli, to drive home to his age the 
lessons of the past.^ 

1 H. F. Pelham, article Livy, in Encyclopcedia Britannica. 

* Vide Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (various editions, English 
translations 1836 and 1883). 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The literature on Livy is so well organized in the various manuals that no 
detailed bibliography is necessary here. Several editions of the text may be 
noted, however. They are those of W. Weissenborn and M. Miiller (3 vols., 
Teubner, 1882-1885; 2d ed.. Vols. I-II, 1901-1915); A. Zingerle (3 vols., 
1883-1904) ; R. S. Conway and C. F. Walters (Oxford Library of Classical 



256 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Authors, Vol. I, 1914). The translation in the Loeb Classical Library is by 
B. O. Foster (13 vols., Vol. I, 1919), that in Everyman's Library is by W. M. 
Roberts (3 vols., 191 2). Bibliographies are to be found in the Jahresbericht 
iiber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschajt, Vol. CXLVII 
(1910), pp. 113 sqq. for 1901-1909; Sup. Vol. CLVI, pp. 513 sqq.; Vol. 
CLXXni (1915), pp. 73 sq., pp. 210 sq.; Vol. CLXXVU (1916-1918), p. 241. 



CHAPTER XXII 
TACITUS 

From Livy to Tacitus is somewhat like passing from Herodotus 
to Thucydides. Tacitus, too, was an artist in history, a consum- 
mate artist. His style is the result of the maturity, not only of 
individual, but also of national achievement. The charm of the 
naive is lost. The story-telling power that carries one through 
interminable detail by making narrative entertaining is no gift of 
Tacitus. His appeal, like that of Thucydides, is to intelligence. 
But the intelligence of the age of the Fabians was not the same as 
that of the age of Pericles ; and beyond the general standards which 
they set themselves, there is little resemblance between the work 
of the greatest of Greek historians and that of the greatest of the 
Latins. For both, history was a tribunal, the final one ; but where 
Thucydides was a magistrate, Tacitus was an advocate, — the most 
brilliant, perhaps, who ever sought to determine the judgment of 
Time, but an advocate all the same. His client was Rome itself, 
and the stake was human liberty ; but these impersonal ideals 
were less in evidence in the handling of his case than the dangers 
they encountered, dangers embodied in real men and women, not 
envisaged as abstractions. It was the tyrant, not tyranny, that 
Tacitus attacked ; the immoral men or women whom he could 
name, rather than immorality in general. But however powerfully 
he drove home his argument, he recognized the dignity of the court 
in which he was pleading and asked only the judgment which the 
facts would warrant. Thus, while Thucydides sought to establish 
the truth alone, Tacitus sought to maintain that truth which would 
be of service to the world. How far the two methods coincided 
would depend upon one's conception both of truth and the prag- 
matic values of history. 

Of the life of Cornelius Tacitus we know very little ; our knowl- 

257 



258 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

edge being confined to what he tells himself — and he is most 
uncommunicative — and to the letters of the younger Pliny, his 
intimate friend, who addressed no less than seven epistles to him.^ 
The date of his birth has been fixed, by a surmise as to his probable 
age upon appointment to political office, at about 54 a.d. ; and he 
must have lived through approximately the first two decades of 
the next century. The marked stages of his political career are 
indicated by him in somewhat enigmatic fashion at the opening of 
his Histories: "My poHtical position was begun by Vespasian, 
augmented by Titus and carried still higher by Domitian," ^ This 
has been taken to mean that Vespasian made him quaestor; that 
he became aedile or tribune of the people under Titus and praetor 
under Domitian.^ His marriage with the daughter of Agricola 
calls out a passing comment,^ but, although he immortalized his 
wife's father, he is practically silent about his home life. He in- 
dicates that he left Rome for four years upon the completion of 
his praetorship^ but nowhere does he indicate where he spent this 
time. Conjecture naturally connects it with his famous monograph 
on Germany, although it did not appear until some six years later 
(98 A.D.) ; and still further surmise, hunting for a suitable post 
for observation, would give him the governorship of Belgic Gaul.® 
However this may be, he was back in Rome in 93 a.d., and there is 
ample evidence in his Histories that from then till the close of Domi- 
tian's reign, he lived through the very heart of "the terror." "^ 
He was consul the year after the tyrant's death ; and then began 
to publish his shorter studies, the Life of Agricola in 97 or 98, and 
the Germania in 98. His histories, the works of years of study, 
favored by the quiet resulting from his forced dissimulation under 
the tyranny of Domitian, were published piecemeal, as he completed 

^ Pliny's letters are a valuable source for the society of the day of Tacitus. There 
is a good translation based upon the Teubner text, by J. B. Firth {The Liters of the 
Younger Pliny, 2 vols., 1909-1910). 

2 Tacitus, Historiae, Bk. I, Chap. I. 

' This conjecture has been accepted by G. Boissier, Tacitus and Other Roman 
Studies (translated by W. G. Hutchinson, 1906), p. 26. Cf. discussion by Teuffel- 
Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 333, n. 6. 

* Tacitus, Agricola, Chap. DC. 

* Tacitus, Annates, Bk. XI, Chap. XI, and Agricola, Chap. XLV. 
' Cf. G. Boissier, op. cit., p. 28. 

^ Tacitus, Agricola, Chaps, m, XLV. 



TACITUS 259 

them. Boissier has inferred from a letter of Pliny that the Histories 
probably began to appear about 105 a.d., and that it was because 
they had taken Rome by storm that Pliny suffered a sudden and 
sore temptation to try his own hand at history as a means of achiev- 
ing immortality.^ A chance remark in the Annals, that the Roman 
Empire ''now extends to the Red Sea"^ through Egypt, implies 
that these words were written about ten years later (c. 115 a.d.), 
when Trajan had carried the frontiers this far. Finally, an in- 
scription discovered in modern times in Caria indicates that toward 
the end of Trajan's reign, Tacitus held the great post of proconsul 
in Asia.^ 

Such is the meagre framework for the life of Tacitus, except 
for the indications furnished in the letters of Pliny, which are less 
separate facts than a picture of the society in which they moved 
and of the interests of the two men. Pliny tells us that when he 
began his career at the Roman bar, Tacitus was "already in the 
prime of his glory and renown" * as a celebrated pleader; and he 
still practised pleading after Domitian's death, for we know of one 
important law-suit which he conducted jointly with Pliny. But 
the eloquence to which Pliny bears generous witness ^ awakened 
even less admiration than the histories. These, he asserts, will live 
forever ; and fortunate is the man who can secure mention in their 
enduring pages.* Reading Phny, one might suppose that Tacitus 
belonged to those whom contemporaries already have marked out for 
immortahty. But if so, they were content to let him achieve it 
by his own works, unaided by biographers. 

So much for the outlines of Tacitus' life. But if the external 
facts are lacking, the more intimate picture of his education and 
outlook, of the society he frequented and of the influences upon 
him of its morals, manners and politics, is relatively clear. He was 
an aristocrat, not of the old nobility of Rome, for they had almost 
all disappeared ; but of the newer gentry, drawn from the provinces 



^ Plinius Secundus, Epistulae, Bk. V, Letter 8. Cf. G. Boissier, op. cit., p. 93. 
2 Tacitus, Annates, Bk. II, Chap. LXI. 

* Cf. Bulletin de correspondance hellenique. Vol. XIV (1890), pp. 621-623. 

* Plinius Secundus, Epistulae, Bk. VIII, Letter 20. 

' Ibid., Bk. II, Letter i. Tacitus is "the most eloquent man in Rome." 
6 Ibid., Bk. VI, Letter 16; Bk. VII, Letter 33. 



26o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

or from the official classes.* It was a wealthy and polite society, 
like that of the old regime in France; one where wits counted, 
where literature was a passport to elegant salons and clever repartee 
might make, or unmake, fortunes. It was more a school for scandal 
than for history. There was much floating gossip which Tacitus, 
as a man of the world, could hardly fail to pick up ; mostly mali- 
cious gossip, concerned with personaUties rather than with political 
movements, spiteful guesses as to what was going on by those who 
wished to pose as knowing, and who felt aggrieved that they did 
not, or generally depreciating comments by the poUtically unem- 
ployed. The only thing to recommend this unlovely growth of 
scandal-mongering was its contrast with the still more unlovely 
output of adulation on the other side. Fortunately such a school 
brings its own remedy in the sophisticated skepticism which it 
breeds in those who indulge in its sensational curriculum, so that 
its worst effects are attenuated. But the skepticism it breeds is 
not of that inquiring kind which leads to science ; it is more the 
dulling influence of surfeited sensationalism, tending to bring indif- 
ference. It is not a happy soil for scientific history. In a mind 
like that of Tacitus it bred a sort of saturnine melancholy which 
pervades all his work. 

Tacitus himself belonged by sentiment to the senatorial faction, 
although in practice accepting office and favor from the emperor. 
His prejudices are not concealed, the only point in doubt is how 
far his sense of scientific obligation to historical truth kept him 
within the restraints of accuracy .^ It is a problem which will 
probably never be solved, for we have little but Tacitus himself 
upon which to base our judgment. Moreover, it is the one subject 
upon which the commentators upon Tacitus have almost invariably 
concentrated their remarks. Hence we shall not delay here over 

1 The elder Pliny in his Natural History, Bk. VII, Chap. XVII, refers to a Cornelius 
Tacitus, a Roman knight, who was a financial administrator in Belgic Gaul. It has 
been conjectured that he was either father or uncle to the historian. Cf. G. Boissier, 
op. cit., p. 2. 

* Tacitus' feeling for his class comes out on all occasions. He upholds its dig- 
nity even against itself. For instance, when some nobles so far forgot themselves as 
to go into the imperial Neronian vaudeville, to retrieve their fortunes, he turns the in- 
cident against the emperor, who would bring such disgrace upon the victims. As for 
themselves he comments, " As they have ended their days, I think it due to their an- 
cestors not to hand down their names." Tlie Annals, Bk. XIV, Chap. XTV. 



TACITUS 261 

it, or such related questions as that of the real character of Tiberius ; 
whether the Germania was mainly a moral lesson to the Romans, 
or other well-worn themes of criticism. The mere fact that such 
questions do persist in offering themselves to readers of Tacitus is 
itself an indication of the character of his work as a whole. 

The social prejudices of Tacitus were responsible for more than 
his partiality; they also account for the details as to the fate of 
prominent citizens, with which he clogs his narrative of imperial 
history. No one now cares much about these ill-starred victims 
or unwise plotters. But the audience for which Tacitus wrote 
had a personal interest as keen as his own in the interminable stories 
of intrigue. These were something like family tales of one's ances- 
tors, cherished in a smothered desire for either justification or 
posthumous vengeance. Tacitus found it hard to make up his 
mind to omit any of these crimes, and the result was to give to much 
of his narrative something of that savage flavor which seems most 
appropriate in a Gregory of Tours. One might almost fancy, 
reading such a ''long succession of horrors," ^ that the scene was at 
a Merovingian, semi-civilized court, or among Nibelungen heroes, 
instead of the court and capital of all the world. It is rather too 
much to be convincing ; for however true the facts might be, they 
could hardly be the central theme of history. 

Tacitus was aware that all was not right with such a narrative, 
but could not discover the remedy. He was too close to the scene 
for that, too much involved in the petty issues of family poHtics. 
He knew that the stage was overcrowded and the action a long- 
drawn-out succession of intrigues or atrocities, and from time to 
time commented on his embarrassment in being obUged to repeat 
continually such stories as these. But, on the other hand, since 
the events had happened, and since in his eyes they had formed the 
chief content of imperial history, he felt that his obUgation to his- 
toric accuracy and fulness prevented curtailment. As a historian 
he was happy to gather all the facts he could, however difficult it 
made the literary task of exposition. This comes out in such com- 
ments as the following : 

"Many authors, I am well aware, have passed over the perils 
and punishments of a host of persons, sickened by the multiplicity 
» Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. IV, Chap. XXXI. 



262 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

of them, or fearing that what they had themselves found wearisome 
and saddening, would be equally fatiguing to their readers. For 
myself, I have lighted on many facts worth knowing, though other 
writers have not recorded them." ^ 

But if a sense of scholarship tempted him to tell the whole story, 
how could he retain the interest of his reader? It was Livy's 
question over again. And Tacitus, mindful of how well Livy had 
maintained that interest by digressions and incidental matter 
thrown into the serious current of his work, tried the same devices.^ 
The narrative of what was happening in the city was varied by con- 
stant reference to events in the frontiers or in the provinces. These 
glimpses of the wider current of imperial afifairs in the eyes of the 
modern historian give the meaning to the whole ; ^ to Tacitus they 
rather gave reUef from the oppressive quaUty of his chief subject, 
the fate of men of his class. For instance, after an account of one 
of the Parthian wars he adds : "I have related in sequence the events 
of two summer campaigns as a reUef to the reader's mind from our 
miseries at home." * This is hardly the way to conceive history 
greatly. 

Tacitus himself recognized the shortcomings of his work in this 
regard, without ever quite learning how to overcome them. He 
fancied that the trouble lay in the subject itself, which is but another 
way of saying that the subject was too great for him. This comes 

» Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. VI, Chap. VII (A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb's 
translation) . If they were not recorded, they must have been repeated by word of mouth. 
In any case such a reference shows what vague traces we have as to the sources of Tacitus. 

* Not merely to entertain, however. As he states himself, "he will studiously 
refrain from embroidering his narrative with tales of fabulous marvels, and from di- 
verting his readers with fictions ; that would be unbecoming the dignity of the work he 
has undertaken." Histories, Bk. II, Chap. L. Cf. G. Boissier,o^. cit., p. 75 ; H. Fur- 
neaux, The Annals of Tacitus (2 vols., 2d ed., 1896-1907), Vol. I, pp. 40-41. 

' The best illustration is of course Mommsen. 

* Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. VI, Chap. XXXVII. The remark is all the more 
significant since the chapter on the phoenix having been seen again in Egypt occurs 
just before the account of the Parthian campaigns. One might have thought it was 
sufficient diversion ! 

But even foreign wars became monotonous in time. Cf. ibid. , Bk. XVT, Chap. XVI. 
"Even if I had to relate foreign wars and deaths encountered in the service of the 
State with such a monotony of disaster, I should myself have been overcome by dis- 
gust, while I should look for weariness in my readers, sickened as they would be by the 
melancholy and continuous destruction of our citizens, however glorious to them- 
selves." This is surely personal history, lacking in perception of larger issues. 



TACITUS 263 

out in a remarkable passage in which he frankly compares his task 
with that of Livy, although avoiding mention of his predecessor's 
name: 

"Much of what I have related and shall have to relate, may perhaps, 
I am aware, seem petty trifles to record. But no one must compare my annals 
with the writings of those who have described Rome in old days. They told 
of great wars, of the storming of cities, of the defeat and capture of kings, or 
whenever they turned by preference to home afifairs, they related, with a free 
scope for digression, the strifes of consuls with tribunes, land and corn-laws, 
and the struggles between the commons and the aristocracy. My labours are 
circumscribed and inglorious ; peace wholly unbroken or but slightly disturbed, 
dismal misery in the capital, an emperor careless about the enlargement of the 
empire, such is my theme. Still it will not be useless to study those at first 
sight trifling events out of which the movements of vast changes often take 
their rise. 

"All nations and cities are ruled by the people, the nobility, or by one man. 
A constitution formed by selection out of these elements, it is easy to commend 
but not to produce ; or, if it is produced, it cannot be lasting. Formerly, when 
the people had power or when the patricians were in the ascendant, the popular 
temper and the methods of controlling it, had to be studied, and those who 
knew most accurately the spirit of the Senate and aristocracy, had the credit 
of understanding the age and of being wise men. So now, after a revolution, 
when Rome is nothing but the realm of a single despot, there must be good in 
carefully noting this period, for it is but few who have the foresight to dis- 
tinguish right from wrong or what is sound from what is hurtful, while most 
men learn wisdom from the fortunes of others. Still, though this is instructive, 
it gives very little pleasure. Descriptions of countries, the various incidents 
of battles, glorious deaths of great generals, enchain and refresh a reader's 
mind. I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant, 
incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same 
causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a weari- 
some monotony in my subject matter. Then, again, an ancient historian has 
but few disparagers, and no one cares whether you praise more heartily the 
armies of Carthage or Rome. But of many who endured punishment or dis- 
grace under Tiberius the descendants yet survive ; or even though the families 
themselves may now be extinct, you will find those who, from a resemblance of 
character, imagine that the evil deeds of others are a reproach to themselves. 
Again, even honour and virtue make enemies, condemning, as they do, their 
opposites by too close a contrast. But I return to my work." ^ 

In so many words Tacitus puts his case ; and, as a skilled pleader, 
he puts it well. But a Httle examination of the extract shows how, 

» Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. IV, Chaps. XXXH, XXXUI. 



264 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

in reality, he simply gives his case away. "Peace wholly unbroken 
or but shghtly disturbed, dismay in the capital, an emperor care- 
less about the enlargement of the empire, such is my theme." Its 
history is bound to be "circumscribed and inglorious." These 
words, however, indicate not its limitations as he imagines, but his 
own. For just as Thucydides failed to leave us the history of the 
greatest theme of Greece, Athens at the height of its glory, so 
Tacitus failed adequately to describe that greatest political creation 
of antiquity, which for the first time in history was extending a 
common citizenship throughout the world, building up a common 
law and poUcing the routes of commerce for the arts of peace. It 
was, again, the failure of the pre-scientific mind to appreciate the 
importance of the commonplace and obscure, — which is the major 
theme of life and society.^ There is, however, this difference be- 
tween Thucydides and Tacitus, that the former had personally a 
keen appreciation of the Athens he took for granted ; while Tacitus, 
in spite of all his insight, seems hardly to have seen the Roman 
Empire. He saw and traced its external fortunes ; and his vivid 
picture of details, on distant frontiers as well as at home, lend to 
his work that appearance of reality to which the modern journalist 
aspires. But the deeper facts of statesmanship escaped him, the 
living forces of a busy world intent upon the security of its heritage, 
a world that was something more than a victim of intrigue. Grant- 
ing that he could not analyze in terms of sciences yet undiscovered, 
he might at least have brought to the problem more of that an- 
tique substitute for science, the open mind. He had seen too much 
of life to be capable of its greatest gift, — the sense of wonder, which, 
as Plato said, is the beginning of philosophy.'^ 

The more one examines the Histories and Annals the more one 
feels that such an adverse judgment is justified. Compare the out- 
look of Tacitus upon the problems of his day with those of even 
the most mediocre modern historian of the imperial history, and 
one sees at once what was lacking in the work of the Roman. But 
again, on the other hand, as we have so often insisted in the course 
of these studies, the conclusion does not follow that Tacitus' failure 

1 On Tacitus' avoidance of trivialities see especially the analysis of H. Peter, Die 
geschiclitliche Lilteratur . . ., Vol. II, p. 45. But this is a different matter. 
^ ThecRtetus, 155 D. 



TACITUS 265 

to grasp the essentials of his age is to be judged in the hght of our 
knowledge. If he failed to rise to the full height of the real theme 
of his age, it was partly because history had not yet learned to deal 
with generalized and abstract forces. It dealt with men instead; 
with nations as aggregations of individuals, where character and 
chance are at grips with destiny; with pohcies determined by 
personalities, incidents settled by single appeals or by acts of force. 
There are passing references here and there in Tacitus to the busi- 
ness side of poUtics, but they are generally incidental. The most 
notable exception is the description of "The Panic of the Year 33," * 
as it has been aptly termed by a modern writer. This was too 
serious a social crisis to be ignored. Moreover, it afifected many 
private fortunes. There are as well references to the dangers of 
excessive luxury in Rome, as in the case when Tiberius addressed a 
letter to the Senate on the subject.^ But, upon the whole, questions 
of economics are as few and far between as those of general poHtics.^ 
As for the process of social evolution, Tacitus is almost naively 
conservative. In a society so advanced as that in which he hved 
it almost required a certain wilful ignorance of history to insist, 
as Tacitus does, that : "Mankind in the earliest age lived for a time 
without a single vicious impulse, without punishment and restraints. 
Rewards were not needed when everything right was pursued 
on its own merits ; and as men desired nothing against morality, 
they were debarred from nothing by fear. When however they 
began to throw off equality, and ambition and violence usurped 
the place of self-control and modesty, despotisms grew up and 
became perpetual among many nations."* "Man is born free; 
and everywhere he is in chains" was the way Rousseau put it, 
in the ringing challenge of the opening words of the Social Con- 
tract. Tacitus, too, was writing an indictment of society ; but a 

1 Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. VI, Chaps. XVI, XVII. Cf. W. Steams Davis, 
The Infiuence of Wealth in Imperial Rome (19 10), a stimulating book for careful readers. 

2 Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. Ill, Chaps. LII-LV. 

* There is the repetition of old complaints about the decline of Italian farm supplies 
{ibid., Bk. XII, Chap. XLIII) ; similarly rather dubious comments on Nero's proposed 
reforms in taxation (ibid., Bk. XIII, Chap. LI), with sometimes an interest in the 
supply of metal, as in the silver mines at Nassau (ibid., Bk. XI, Chap. XX). See, also, 
references to Nero's spell of economy, Bk. XV, Chap. XVIII, or his extravagance, 
Bk. XVI, Chap. HI. 

* Ibid., Bk. ni, Chap. XXVI. 



266 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

misreading of history excusable in a prophet is less easy to pardon 
in a historian. 

Tacitus at least had not much of a generalized conception of 
historical processes. And that is why he did not know how to manip- 
ulate the vast and often obscure interrelation of events so as to 
show its larger meaning. It is perhaps too much to say that he 
never saw his history as a whole ; but he never saw it in the whole 
of its setting. He was a great artist rather than a great thinker, 
a wonderful observer and analyst of motives ; but fundamentally 
a master of detail. In effect his depiction reminds one of the old 
Dutch masters; of features drawn with minutest care yet deftly 
and swiftly; of landscapes enriched with everything really there. 
What makes his greatness as an artist is that he combines this 
mastery of detail with a freedom and breadth of movement, a grave 
and sombre power which gives to his work the high quality of 
tragedy. It always speaks with dignity, however trivial the in- 
cident. It never rings false, no matter how strained and rhetorical 
the phrase. Sentences are compressed into phrases and phrases 
into single words; but the crabbed text challenges the reader — 
and remains with him. 

Yet, in spite of all this richness of detail, power of depiction, 
mastery of expression and dignity of spirit, Tacitus remained an 
annalist, whose narrative was held together by that most primitive 
of all Unks, the time nexus. Things are mentioned when they 
happened, because they happened when they did. There is no 
such attempt to trace the complex of events through cause and 
effect as we find in the Greeks. To be sure there are common-sense 
remarks as to why this or that incident arose, but the wider sweep 
of history, which gives it its meaning, is lacking.^ Year by year, 
or event by event, the facts are noted as they occur in the sources, 
and the items jotted down are mostly quite isolated from those 

* This general comment stands in spite of various passages which might be cited 
against it, as, for instance, the closing words of the second book of the Annals, with 
reference to Arminius : "He is still a theme of song among barbarian nations, though 
to Greek historians, who admire only their own achievements, he is unknown, and to 
Romans not as famous as he should be, while we extol the past and are indifferent to 
our own times" (ibid., Bk. II, Chap. LXXXVIII). But if Tacitus had been working 
in the spirit of Herodotus, the Germania would have been incorporated in the history 
as one of the logoi. . 



TACITUS 267 

which precede or follow. Only the extent of detail on each one pre- 
vents the almost mediaeval quality of such a plan from appearing 
at first glance. That it does not do so is due to the skill with which 
the author used his artistry of expression to cover the defects of 
his plan. 

It is typical of such a historian that his best work should be, 
in addition to the depiction of character, — as in the marvellous 
portrayal of Tiberius, — the description of great crises, when events 
so concentrate in a single time or place as not to involve a problem 
in perspective. Of these, the most outstanding instance is the 
opening portion of the Histories, where the revolutionary year 69 
is described in such graphic detail, that, as the translator of the 
text has put it, we know no other year in all antique history as we 
do this. In the rapid passage of events, the play and counterplay 
of emotion, the sudden changes of fortune, mob action uncertain 
yet determining the wavering of its leaders, soldiery in control but 
not sure of itself, and the empire the prize of disorder, we have a 
scene painted with masterful power and scrupulous care. It is 
Tacitus at his best. 

When we turn from the choice and handling of the subject to 
the more technical problem of the use of sources, we find Tacitus 
about as much at sea as in the shaping of his general plan. In the 
first place there is the question of oral tradition and rumor. ^ How 
can it be tested? What criteria are there for the contemporary 
historian, by which to substantiate what he hears ? Time and again 
he comes from this problem. For instance, he tells us that the 
measures taken to avenge the death of Germanicus were "a subject 
of conflicting rumors, not only among the people then living but 
also in after times. So obscure are the greatest events, as some 
take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn 
truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with 
posterity." ^ More flat-footed still is the attack upon such unsup- 
ported rumor as had fastened the crime of Drusus' murder upon 
Tiberius. After giving the story of that crime as he finds it in the 
narratives of most of the best historians, in which Tiberius is not 

1 "Rome with its love of talking." (Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. XIII, Chap. VI.) 
» Ibid., Bk. ni, Chap. XIX. 



268 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

implicated, he relates at length the accusing rumor to disprove it, 
adding: 

"My object in mentioning and refuting this story, is, by a conspicuous 
example, to put down hearsay, and to request all into whose hands my work 
shall come, not to catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumors in preference 
to genuine history which has not yet been perverted into romance." ^ 

This seems clear and straightforward; but current history 
simply cannot ignore current gossip, and Tacitus' histories are 
constantly fed by its sediment-bearing stream. Indeed, as the 
written sources he consulted were themselves often but the com- 
posite result of similar rumors, it is not to be wondered at if such 
phrases as "it was said" or "many say" run through the narrative 
as substantiating references. Sometimes he definitely admits 
the importance of such source material, as in connection with the 
description of Piso's death at Tiberius' instigation : 

"I remember to have heard old men say that a document was often seen 
in Piso's hands the substance of which he never divulged, but which his friends 
repeatedly declared contained a letter from Tiberius with instructions referring 
to Germanicus, and that it was his intention to produce it before the Senate 
and upbraid the emperor, had he not been deluded by vain promises from 
Sejanus. Nor did he perish, they said, by his own hand, but by that of one 
sent to be his executioner. 

"Neither of these statements would I positively afl&rm; still it would not 
be right for us to conceal what was related by those who lived up to the time 
of my youth." ^ 

In short, it was inevitable that much of Tacitus' work would > 
have to depend upon oral testimony. How much this was the case 
is impossible to state definitely, for except in the matter of ofl&cial 
documents and when his sources disagree and he must choose be- 
tween them, he does not mention them individually.^ However, 
it should be recalled that he himself had been contemporary with 

1 Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. IV, Chap. XI. 

2 im., Bk. Ill, Chap. XVI. 

' Even this is greatly to his credit. Boissier, commenting on it, says (op. cit., p. 55) : 
"He is the ancient historian who most frequently cites the authors and documents he 
has consulted. He does not do so out of a kind of erudition run mad, as is so often 
done nowadays to make a show of being better informed than other people, since . . . 
no one then deemed it any merit in an author, and since consequently he could reap no 
glory therefrom." 



TACITUS 269 

most of his narratives, for he was about fourteen years old when 
Nero died, and as a boy he must have heard many a reminiscence of 
the days of Tiberius and events of Augustus. The influence of these 
experiences upon his histories must extend far beyond single in- 
cidents which might be attributed to this or that source; they 
would largely determine his whole outlook. 

As to written sources, Tacitus falls back upon the well-accepted 
principles which we have seen followed by his predecessors, es- 
pecially Livy. Where his sources agree, he accepts the narrative — 
unless denied by more authoritative personal or oral accounts. 
** Proposing as I do (he says), to follow the consentient testimony 
of historians, I shall give the difference in their narratives under 
the writers' names." ^ But he does not follow these sources bhndly. 
He checks one by another, and does not always adhere to the same 
one in different parts of his works.^ When there is httle to choose 
between contradictory sources he is plainly at a loss. For instance, 
take a comment like this : 

"I can hardly venture on any positive statement about the consular elec- 
tions, now held for the first time under this emperor, or indeed subsequently, 
so conflicting are the accounts we find not only in the historians but in Tiberius' 
own speeches." ' 

This extract is interesting as indicating Tacitus' constant use 
of documentary material, as well as narrative. He consulted the 
fund of information in the Daily Register,'^ and memoirs of notable 
characters.^ The problem in criticism, however, as to what he 
most relied upon, whether he simply rewrote some of the more 
excellent historical accounts before his day, or completely remade 
the story, will hardly ever be settled, since the authorities he used 
have practically all perished.* It is abundantly clear, however, 
that he spared no pains to get at the truth; and that, lacking a 

1 Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. XIII, Chap. XX. 

* Cf. H. Fumeaux, The Annals of Tacitus, Vol. I, p. 26. 
s Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. I, Chap. LXXXI. 

* E.g. ibid., Bk. Ill, Chap. III. On this see the chapter by Boissier, op. cit., 
pp. 197 sqq. 

6 Cf. Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. IV, Chap. LIII. 

' All studies of Tacitus' use of source material are much in debt to the various 
works of PhiUppe Fabia, especially Les sources de Tacite dans les histoires et les annates 
(1893). Vide infra, Bibliographical Note. 



270 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

knowledge of the principles of source-criticism which leads the mod- 
ern scholar to trace the history of his documents before he risks the 
story of the events they record, he nevertheless made up by genius 
for the shortcomings of science, in so far as that could well be 
done. 

That with all his handicap Tacitus takes rank still in the fore- 
front of the world's historians is due not only to his genius as a 
word painter, or his insight into character, — the two gifts in which 
he excels, — but also to his idea of history itself. He has a most 
exalted conception of it. There is small tolerance for the dilettante 
outlook of those "elderly men who amuse themselves comparing 
present and past." ^ He holds, in common with all earnest thinkers 
of antiquity, that it is "history's highest function to let no worthy 
action be uncommemorated, and to hold the reprobation of posterity 
as a terror to evil words and deeds." ^ This is to be done without 
bitterness or favor (sine ira et studio)} There was also more of 
the poet in his make-up than in any other antique historian. His 
sense of words, his use of compressed, epigrammatic phrases are 
genuinely poetical devices.^ And still more poetical than these im- 
plements of expression are the wealth of color and variety of action 
which give the illusion of life to his pages. In a remarkable passage, 
a great modern Hellenist has described the masterpieces of Greek 
history as suggestive of bas-reliefs, thin in outline and low in 
tone.^ They are conceived in one dimension, as it were; lacking 
in depth and motion. This is just what Tacitus supplies to antique 
historiography. He is a romanticist as opposed to their classicism ; 
a genius with the creative grasp of a Victor Hugo but holding him- 
self in, consciously, from that "folly of extremes" which is the dan- 
ger fronting those who can carry their art so far. 

Restraint with power behind it; in this respect at least, the 
genius of Tacitus is a living embodiment of that of Rome. 

1 Tacitus, The Annals, Bk. XIII, Chap. III. 

2 Ibid., Bk. Ill, Chap. LXV. » Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. I. 
* Cf. H. Furneaux, The Annals of Tacitus, Vol. I, p. 40. 

" A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la litterature grecque, Vol. II, p. 568. 



TACITUS 271 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Tacitus* works are the early Dialogus de Oratoribus, a treatise of much in- 
terest for the study of the influences forming his ideas on history as well as 
oratory ; De Vita ei Moribus Julii Agricolae, the biography of his father-in-law 
written somewhat in the manner of Sallust ; Germania, the celebrated descrip- 
tion of Germany ; Historiae, covering the years 69 to 96, including the reigns of 
Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. It originally ex- 
tended over some fourteen, or perhaps twelve, books, but only the first four 
and half of the fifth have been preserved; Ab Excessu Divi Augusti, known 
generally as the Annates, in sixteen or eighteen books, covering the years 14 to 
68 A.D., f rom the death of Augustus to that of Nero, and hence including the reigns 
of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. The manuscripts upon which our 
texts rest do not go beyond the tenth or eleventh centuries, and for the first six 
books of the Annals there is only a single manuscript, discovered in the fifteenth 
century. There has been an attempt to prove it the forgery of the humanist 
Poggio Bracciolini, but the genuineness of the text is now not questioned. The 
best edition of the text of the Historiae for English readers is that by W. A. 
Spooner (1891), of the Annales, that by H. Furneaux (2 vols., 2d ed., 1896- 
1907), both of which have elaborate notes in English. The standard edition 
of the text by C. Halm has been brought up to date (2 vols., 5th ed., Teubner, 
1913-1914) and that by J. Orelli has been revised and reedited by H. Schweiger- 
Sidler, G. Andresen and A. Meiser (2 vols., 2d ed., 1877-1895). Latest edi- 
tions of the text of the Annales by C. Nipperdey and G. Andresen are those of 
1904-1908 and 1915 (2 vols., 1904-1908), (Bks. I- VI, nth ed., 1915). There 
is an edition of the Annales by C. D. Fisher (Oxford Library of Classical Authors, 
1906). Of translations, that used here, and the most generally known, is by 
A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb {Annals, 1869, Histories, 2d ed., 1872, and 
frequent reprints). The translation in Everyman's Library (2 vols., 1908) 
is that of A. Murphy, first published in 1793. More recent translations are 
those by G. G. Ramsay {Annals, 2 vols., 1904-1909; Histories, 1915), and by 
W. Peterson and M. Hutton in the Loeb Classical Library (1914). 

The chief work on the style of Tacitus is A. A. Draeger's Ueber Syntax 
und Stil des Tacitus (3d ed., 1882). In France the studies of P. Fabia have 
gained wide recognition, especially his discussion of the sources Tacitus used, 
Les Sources de Tacite dans les histoires et les annales (1893), in which he argues, 
as does also E. G. Hardy, Studies in Roman History (1910), for the theory that 
Tacitus relied chiefly upon a work of the elder Pliny. In spite of the careful 
analysis of text upon which this theory rests, E. Courbaud, in Les procedes d'art 
de Tacite dans les "Histoires " (191 8), very aptly points out that such a conclusion 
seems incredible in view of the character of the younger Phny's comments on 
Tacitus. Further discussion may be followed in the two works of H. Peter 
frequently referred to in the text. Die geschichtliche Litteratur iiber die romische 
Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Quellen (2 vols., 1897), and Wahrheit und 
Kunst (191 1), and in German dissertations and many articles in classical 



272 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

reviews. For recent bibliographies see the Jahresbericht iiber die Fortschritte der 
klassischenAUertutnswissenschaft, Sup. Vol. CLXV (1913), pp. 224 sqq., and Vol. 
CLXVII (1914), pp. 201 sqq., which covers the literature from 1904 to 1912 ; 
see also Vol. CLXXIII (1915), pp. 87 sqq., pp. 216 sqq.; Vol. CLXXVII (1916- 
1918), pp. 87 sq., pp. 251 sqq. The literature in Tacitus is continually growing, 
and manuals like Teuffel-Schwabe are inadequate in this case. This continued 
interest is itself a reason for stiU further output, since the critical student of 
historiography has obviously here a problem in the art if not in the science of 
history developed as seldom elsewhere in historical literature, — that of per- 
sonality. Pliny was right as to the immortality of such work. 



CHAPTER XXIII 
FROM SUETONIUS TO AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 

There were two of Tacitus' contemporaries who rivalled him in 
that part of his work where he was most successful, — portraiture ; 
Plutarch, the Greek, and Suetonius, the Roman biographer, were 
both of his time ; and all three used to some degree the same ma- 
terials. Indeed there is so much resemblance between Plutarch's 
lives of Galba and Otho and the description of the reigns of these two 
emperors by Tacitus in his Histories, that critics, after the most 
minute analysis of the two texts, are still unable to agree as to 
whether one of them was dependent upon the other, and if so which 
one ; or whether both depend upon a common source ; while the 
relation of Suetonius to them, and in general to Tacitus, remains one 
of the most interesting problems in source-criticism.^ However 
that may be, the vogue of biographies in this age is indicative of 
the same tendencies and limitations we have noted in Tacitus. It 
is not merely the interest in character or characters which is sig- 
nificant ; that is peculiar to no one age since it belongs to all. It is . 
the concentration of interest upon individuality to the exclusion 
of the larger social or political view. J 

Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 75-160 a.d.) was, like Tacitus, an up- 
per class Roman who devoted himself to scholarship ; by no means 
so much a personage as Tacitus, but perhaps more of a scholar. 
In his researches he reminds one of Varro, for he had a perfect mania 
for finding and noting all kinds of details, physical peculiarities, i\ 
trivial incidents, obscure situations, in short all the miscellany that 
might go into an encyclopaedic Notes and Queries dealing with 
biography. He ultimately held a position where his insatiable 
curiosity could have full play, as secretary to Hadrian's praetorian 
prefect, Septicius Clarus, a position which opened to him the secret 
documents of the imperial cabinet. The result was a work as dif- 

* See the discussion referred to in the Bibliographical Note on Tacitus' works. 

273 



274 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

ferent as possible from Tacitus', yet sharing the same immortality 
by reason of the subjects of which it treated. 

The Lives of the Ccesars (De Vita Ccesarum . , . ) is a collec- 
tion of biographies in eight books. The first six books are each 
devoted to the life of a single emperor (Caesar to Nero), but the 
seventh book covers the revolutionary year 69 with the three em- 
perors it produced, and the Flavians make up the eighth. It was 
published in the year 120 a.d., and so Tacitus, in his old age, 
after "enjoying the serene glory of a great and serious historian," * 
may have enjoyed reading that anecdotal counterpart to his grave 
and unbending narrative. For the work of Suetonius is the very 
antithesis of the Annals. It is, indeed, something of a new genre. 
As Boissier has so well put it : 

"We plainly perceive in reading the Lives of the Ccesars, that the author 
has aimed at making a work of a new order ; he has avoided including what 
was to be found in history as it was understood before him. He has not ar- 
ranged events in chronological sequence, which is a rule of the historic art ; 
rhetoric is quite absent ; political views and general reflections occupy small 
space ; he has made no pretence of teaching. On the other hand, anecdotes 
abound, told simply, without any attempt at effect or pictorial treatment. 
We read in his pages original documents, letters especially, when they throw 
some light on the great man he is describing ; the witticisms fathered on him 
and those made at his expense ; the monuments he has erected or restored are 
enumerated; the games he has given the people, a universal passion at the 
time ; the signs which have announced his death, for the author is very super- 
stitious and his readers still more so ; finally, we are provided with his physical 
portrait, in which nothing is omitted, from the dimensions of his figure to the 
colour of his eyes. Suetonius has no compunction in telling us without any 
reticence all known of his infirmities; how Caesar combed his hair over his 
forehead to conceal his baldness, how Claudius sputtered and jogged his head 
in speaking, how Domitian, who had been a very handsome lad when young, was 
afflicted towards the end with a huge stomach borne on thin legs, and only 
found consolation in saying, 'that there is nought more pleasing than beauty, 
but also nought that passes more quickly.' Here, obviously, we are at the 
antipodes of ancient history. It is highly probable that works of this order 
held no very high place in the hierarchy of Uterary forms drawn up by the 
grammarians of the time. Never would PUny, who knew and Uked them both, 
have committed the impropriety of putting Suetonius on a level with Tacitus. 
Tacitus is a great personage, a serious man, a senator, a consul, who 'graves 
for eternity.' Suetonius is but an advocate, a student (scholasticus) , who wants 

1 G. Boissier, Tacitus and Other Roman Studies, p. 78. The extract quoted pre- 
cedes this remark. 



FROM SUETONIUS TO AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 275 

to divert his contemporaries. And yet Suetonius has created a form which is 
to last so long as the Empire and he survive. History shall scarce be written 
henceforth save on the model he has designed ; on the contrary, whilst Tacitus 
is always admired, he will never again be imitated. He was almost the last 
of the historians who wrote in the ancient fashion." 

From the day of Hadrian, the decline in Latin literature which 
had already set in proceeded rapidly. Greek historians, it is true, 
to some extent made up for the deficiency, as we have already seen, 
although very hurriedly. But there were no western counterparts 
to Appian, Arrian or Cassius Dio; and, apart from the pleasant 
miscellany of the Attic Nights (Noctes Atticae) of Aulus Gellius 
(born c. 130), with their scraps of information, and some epitomes 
of history, paring down the old masters, we have little but bio- 
graphical continuations of Suetonius to record, until the very clos- 
ing days of imperial history. 

Of these, a certain Marius Maximus (c. 165-230), carried the 
biographies of emperors down from Nerva to Elagabalus.^ His 
work seems still to have been a creditable performance. Others 
continued at this popular substitute for history ; and finally, some 
one gathered together a collection from Hadrian to Numerianus 
(117-284 A.D.), drawn from the works of some six so-called Scrip- 
tores Historiae Augustae. These are frankly mediaeval in style 
and content. Servile in tone, they are both trivial and self-con- 
tradictory in a helpless sort of way. It is hardly an apology for 
them to say that, after all, "they mean well and intend to state 
what is, or what they beUeve to be, the truth. Where they go 
astray, they are rather dupes than impostors." ^ 

After such a foretaste of the Middle Ages, it is with distinct 
surprise that, just as we are entering those ages in reality, we come 
upon the single, outstanding figure of a good historian, — a Greek 
but writing in Latin a continuation, not of Suetonius but of Tacitus. 

Ammianus MarcelHnus (c. 330-400 a.d.) was a native of Antioch 
who fought with the Roman armies all along the threatened fron- 
tiers, east and west. He knew the world of the barbarians as well 
as the culture of the empire ; and his rich and varied experiences 
but strengthened his large share of native common-sense. The 

^ Cf. H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litteratur . . . , Vol. II, pp. io6 sqq. 
' Tcuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 392. 



276 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

combination of plentiful information and good judgment did not 
produce a work of genius; but the Rerum Gestarum Libri, which 
carried the story of Rome from Nerva to the death of Valens (96- 
378 A.D.), was a performance worthy of the best company in an- 
tique historiography. Only the more contemporary sections 
(Bks. XIV-XXXV) have been preserved. As they cover but the 
years 353 to 378 a.d., it is evident that either the early books were 
relatively slight and introductory, or that those we have belong 
only to a division of the whole series, dealing with contemporary 
history, — much as Tacitus separated his Histories from his Annals} 
In any case, all that we have of Ammianus is the history of the 
last twenty-five years preceding the battle of Adrianople. 

This last work of Roman history is frankly that of a soldier,'^ 
a blunt, sincere man, honest and open-minded, a pagan, yet tolerant 
of Christians, not thoroughly at home in his study, yet proud of 
his scholarship, writing with the colloquial turn of a man of affairs 
and still turning it to use by preparing a history which was to be 
read in pubhc. There is almost a touch of romance in the fact 
that this is so ; that the last of the antique histories was to be de- 
claimed, in competition with the output of the rhetoricians, the 
way the history of Herodotus was given to his age. Ammianus 
seems to have tried hard to brush up his Latin for such public pres- 
entation, but, in spite of his residence at Rome while he was writing 
it, his expressions remain clumsy, and obvious affectations even 
render the text obscure. It is only when one compares him with 
any other Latin historian for centuries before or after him that one 
appreciates his value as a straightforward, if somewhat awkward, 
witness to the truth. No fitter tribute has ever been paid him than 
that by the greatest historian who has ever dealt with the fortunes 
of Rome. For when Gibbon parted company with him, at the 
year 378, he took the occasion to bid Ammianus the farewell of a 
fellow-craftsman worthy of mastership in the guild of history.^ 

^ Cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 429, n. 3. 

* Vide T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century (1901), Chap. II. 

" Cf. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XXVI. (J. B. 
Bury's edition, Vol. Ill, p. 122.) 

"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an ac- 
curate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without 
indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary." 



FROM SUETONIUS TO AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 277 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

There are editions of the text of Suetonius by C. L. Roth (Teubner, 1858, 
reprinted 1886) and by M. Ihm (Teubner, Vol. I, 1908). The De Vita Ca- 
sarum {Divus Julius; Divus Augustus) has been edited with notes in English, 
by H. T. Peck (1889) and {Divus Augustus), by E. S. Shuckburgh (1896). 
For extracts see H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae (2 vols., 1906- 
1914), Vol. II, pp. 54 sqq. The translation in the Loeb Classical Library is 
by J. C. Rolfe (2 vols., 1914-1920). A. Mace, Essai sur Suetone (BibUotheque 
des 6coles frangaises d'Athens et de Rome, Vol. LXXXII, 1900) gives an ex- 
haustive bibliography. For bibliographical material see Jahresbericht iiber 
die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumsivissenschaft, Vol. CXXXIV (1907), 
pp. 237 sqq., for 1897-1906; Vol. CLXXIII (1915), p. 87, p. 215; Vol. 
CLXXVII (1916-1918), p. 86, p. 250. 

The most recent edition of Aldus Gellius' Noctes Atticae is by C. Hosius 
(2 vols., 1903). There is an old translation by A. Beloe, The Attic Nights 
(3 vols., 1 793) . On the Scriptores Historiae Augustae see H. Peter, Die geschicht- 
liche Litteratur iiber die romische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Quellen 
(2 vols., 1897), Vol. II, and his bibUographical survey in Jahresbericht iiber die 
Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumsivissenschaft, Vol. CXXX (1906), pp. i sqq.; 
see also Sup. Vol. CLVI (1912), pp. 73 sqq. 

Editions of the text of Ammianus Marcellinus are by F. Eyssenhardt 
(1871), V. Gardthausen (2 vols., 1874-1875) and by C. U. Clark (2 vols., 1910- 
1915). The translation by C. D. Yonge in Bohn's Classical Library has not 
yet been superseded but a translation by C. U. Clark has been announced 
by the Loeb Classical Library. Among the many articles on Ammianus 
mention should be made of those by T. R. Glover in Life and Letters in the Fourth 
Century (1901), Chap. II, and S. Dill in Roman Society in the Last Century of 
the Western Empire (2d ed., 1899, reprinted 1906), Bk. I, Chap. I. Recent 
bibUographical material wiU be found in Jahresbericht, etc.. Sup. Vol. CLVI 
(1912), pp. 95 sqq.; Vol. CLXXVII (1916-1918), p. 61, p. 227. 



SECTION V 
CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 

CHAPTER XXIV 
THE NEW ERA 

The great historians of antiquity were writers of modern his- 
tory. Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, were inter- 
ested in what had happened because of what was happening, and 
great things were happening in their day. Herodotus writing, 
as he said, "in order that the great and wondrous deeds of both 
Greeks and barbarians may not be effaced by time" massed his 
facts around that world-stirring crisis which had just been passed, 
the Persian wars. Thucydides, persuaded that "former ages were 
not great either in their wars or in anything else," believed that the 
war that passed before his eyes was the greatest event in the world's 
history, and he bent his life's energies to describing it. Polybius, 
too, carried off to Rome in the track of her victorious armies, saw 
as a captive the miraculous dawn of that first empire of the Mediter- 
ranean world, and he wrote his history to explain it. Livy's vision 
was also always fastened upon the imperial present and the calm, 
clear-headed patriotism which had brought it about. Tacitus 
lacked this generous enthusiasm, but his interests were not anti- 
quarian ; the great age in which he lived drew his observation and 
supplied him with his task. From the clash of East and West 
in the Ionian cities in the sixth century B.C., whereby the critical 
curiosity of men and societies was first made active, to the tragic 
close of the drama of the ancient world, almost a thousand years 
later, history was centred upon the great events and the characters 
that dominated the world in which each writer lived. 

But there was one event of supreme importance that had no 
Herodotus to gather up its details, no Polybius to weld it into the 
world's history with scientific insight and critical acumen — the 

278 



THE NEW ERA 279 

rise of Christianity.* The product of obscure enthusiasts in an 
obscure and despised Oriental people, it did not win more than a 
disdainful paragraph (in Tacitus) at the hands of pagan historians. 
Its own writings were but poor attempts at history compared with 
what other lesser events produced. When the scanty texts of the 
sayings and doings of Jesus were taking the shape in which we have 
them now, a Plutarch was writing biographies of all the pagan 
heroes. But no Christian Plutarch appeared for another three 
centuries; and then all that the learned Jerome was able to pre- 
serve for us was three or four paragraphs on the lives of the lead- 
ing apostles.^ 

There were several reasons for this. In the first place Chris- 
tianity began in a most humble way and among the unlettered. It 
did not burst out in a flame of conquest like Mohammedanism, but 
crept, half-hidden, along the foundations of society. Its very ob- 
scurity left little to chronicle. If it changed the lives of men, they 
were lives too insignificant to be noticed by history. Only in the 
present age, after democracy itself has learned to read and begun 
to think, is the historian awakening to the spiritual forces in the 
lives of the obscure. But even now we pay little attention to such 
seemingly extraneous elements as the beliefs of foreign immigrants 
settled in our city slums — the class that furnished the majority of 
the early converts to Christianity. In any case the Greco-Roman 
world troubled itself little about the history of the Jews and less 
stUl about that of the Christians.^ 

Even when Christianity had penetrated the society of the 
learned, moreover, it stimulated little historical investigation. 

^ C/. H. von Soden, Das Interesse des apostoUschen Zeitalters an der evangelischen 
Geschichte, in Theologische Ahhandlungen (1892), pp. 113-169. 

* Jerome's De Viris lUustribus, written after the model of the work of the same 
name by Suetonius. 

3 The emphasis which subsequent ages has placed upon references to Judaism and 
Christianity in pagan writers has given those passages an altogether factitious promi- 
nence. There are at best only a very few, and those are mostly either incidental or 
pointed with ridicule. See T. Reinach, Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains relatifs au 
judaistne, reunis, traduits et annates; the opening sections of the important work of 
J. Juster, Les Juifs dans Vempire rontain, leur condition juridique, economigue et sociale 
(2 vols., 1914). E. Schiirer's Geschichte des jiidischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi 
(also in English translation) remains the standard work on the period. See also 
articles in the Jewish Encyclopadia dealing with the Diaspora. 



28o INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Pagan savants, like Celsus/ sometimes challenged the sources of 
Christian tradition and scripture,^ but for the most part the great 
controversy between Christian and pagan writers took place in 
fields that lay beyond the scope of history. Christianity was a 
religion, not a thing of politics, and although, as we shall see, the 
problem of fitting it into the Jewish and then into the gentile setting 
did involve historical conceptions, yet the main interests awakened 
by it were theological. This meant that history, as a record of 
mere human events, was bound to suffer; for theology, in so 
far as it concerned itself with those events, sought to transfer them 
from the realm of human action to that of divine grace, and so to 
interpret the phenomena of time and change in terms of a time- 
less and unchanging Deity.^ The western world has since grate- 
fully built its theology upon the conceptions so brilliantly worked 
out by the Fathers, and the historian whose business it is to register 
the judgments of society cannot fail to appreciate their great 
formative influence in the history of thought. But their very 
success was a loss to history ; for it placed the meaning of human 
effort outside the range of humanity, and thus impressed upon the 
western world a fundamentally unhistorical attitude of mind. 

The motive force which accomplished this theological victory 
was faith. Faith was the chief intellectual demand which Chris- 
tianity made of its converts.* By it the mind was enabled to view 
events in a perspective which reached beyond the limits of time and 
space into that imaginary over-world which we know as Eternity. 
Faith did more than remove mountains, it removed the whole ma- 
terial environment of life. There have been few such triumphs of 
the spirit as it achieved in those early days of the new religion. 
But the fact remains that this achievement was largely at the cost 
of history. Faith, one can see from the criticism of those first really 

1 Vide infra, pp. 294 sqq. * As Apion did those of the Jews. 

» It is significant to see how the conception of the essential unhistoricity of God, 
as a Being beyond the reach of change, has been growingly modified in modem times. 
The increase in .the number of those mystics who have revised their theology in terms 
of modem science and philosophy (especially Bergsonian) is, from the standpoint of 
the history of pure thought, the most decisive triumph of the historical spirit. The 
Deity himself becomes historical ; eternity disappears ; all is time — and change. 

* Charity was hardly an intellectual virtue, at least as conceived by the 
Fathers. 



THE NEW ERA 281 

conscious historians, the Ionian Greeks, is an impediment to genuine 
history, unless the imagination which it quickens is kept within 
control. The historian needs rather to confine his imagination by 
skepticism and to be more upon his guard against believing when- 
ever he feels the will to beUeve than at any other time — which, in 
the realm of reUgious virtues, has sometimes been mistaken for a sin.^ 
Moreover, over and above the fact that faith puts a premium upon 
credulity,^ it indicates an absence of any real, serious interest in 
historical data. When one "takes a thing on faith," it is because 
one is intent upon using it for something else of more importance — 
so important, indeed, that often while still unreahzed it can clothe 
with reality the very condition upon which it depends. Thus the 
"will to believe" can master phenomena in a way not permitted to 
historians. Faith and scientific history do not readily work together. 
If this is clear in the dawn of Greek history, when science first 
challenged faith, it stands out even more clearly still in that very 
antithesis of the creations of Hellas, which we may best term the 
gospel according to Paul.^ Nowhere else in the world's literature 
is there a call to faith like that of Paul, and few, even of the great 
creators of religious doctrine, have been more indifferent than he to 
the historical data, upon which, in the order of nature, that faith 
would seem to rest. The Apostle to the Gentiles cared little for 
the details of the fife of Jesus, and boasted of his indifference.* 
He learned of the divinity of Christ by a flash of revelation which 
marked him out as one of the prophets. Then the desert, rather 
than Jerusalem, furnished him that tremendous plan of Christian 
doctrine upon which Christian orthodoxy still rests, which included 
the whole drama of humanity from the Creation and the Fall to the 
Redemption and the vision of its meaning, revealed on the road to 
Damascus. The plan was based upon the law and the prophets, 
but only because Paul's thought ran in terms of their teaching. 
His scheme was one that needed no verification from the sources 



^ There are all kinds of faith, to be sure. We are speaking only of religious faith 
which transfers phenomena from the natural to the supernatural world and is, there- 
fore, the chief opponent of rationalism. 

2 As Celsus, the pagan critic, so cogently suggested. 

3 And we must regard Paul as the intellectual creator of Christian theology. 
* C/. the first, second and third chapters of The Epistle to the Galatians. 



282 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

even of sacred scripture, if once it could carry conviction by inner 
experience.^ 

Finally the faith of early Christianity was largely involved in a 
doctrine which centred attention not in this world but in the world 
to come ; and the world to come was about to come at any moment. 
Immortality for the individual was a doctrine shared by other 
mystery religions of the pagan world ; but only Christianity de- 
veloped — out of the apocalyptic literature of the Jews — the 
vaster dream of an imminent cataclysm in which the world to come 
should come for all at once. While this doctrine appears in full 
force in Christian circles only from the latter part of the first to the 
middle of the second century, and was most developed in circles 
given over to what might be viewed, even by ecclesiastics, as ex- 
treme spirituality, it undoubtedly had a large and damaging in- 
fluence upon Christian historiography. There is nothing which 
so effectively destroys our interest in the past as to live under the 
shadow of a great and impending event. It would not have been 
the same had each individual convert merely been keenly aware 
of the shortness of his own life and the vision of the coming day of 
judgment. That is still and has always been a perspective be- 
fore religious minds ; and however strange it may seem, it does 
not entirely kill the interest in the origin and evolution of these 
things which are so soon to vanish from before the eyes of death. 
Such is the vital instinct in us.* But it is a different thing for 
heaven and earth and all mankind to pass away at once as these 
early Christians expected them to do at any time. A few years 
ago we were to traverse the tail of a comet and there was some 
speculation as to whether its deadly gases might not exterminate 
all life on this globe. Had the probability been more probable, 
had astronomers and men of science determined the fact by some 
experimental proof, with what breathless and hypnotic gaze we 
should have watched the measured coming of that star across the 

1 The Pauline doctrine involved a conceptual parallel to history, which apparently 
furnished a better past to the world, one more reasonable and more probable than that 
which actually had been the case. 

2 The influence of the belief in immortality upon historical perspectives invites 
our attention here; but the subject is too intricate for hurried consideration. Un- 
doubtedly the emphasis upon a contrast between time and eternity obscured the 
meaning of phenomena in their time-setting. 



THE NEW ERA 283 

gulfs of space ! Our vast, unresting industries would have ceased ; 
for there would have been no tomorrow to supply. Our discoveries in 
science, our creations in art would have been like so many useless 
monuments in an untenanted world — and science and art would 
have had no incentive to go on. The one interest for us all would 
have been that growing point of light — that doom, swift, inevit- 
able, universal. Here comes a problem in psychology. For as a 
matter of fact that same doom is coming ; we know it with absolute 
certainty ; we know there can be no escape. How many of those 
who saw that comet pass will be alive fifty years from now ? In a 
century, at most, the earth will be the sepulchre of all — just as 
much a sepulchre as if the race had perished in one grand catastro- 
phe. And what a little interval is a century ! Yet our mills work 
on, our discoveries continue, our art goes on producing its visions 
of beauty ; and above all, we increase our interest in the distant 
past, digging for history in the hills of Crete and Asia and working 
as never before to rescue and reconstruct the past from archives 
and libraries. Why ? Because humanity is more to us than our in- 
dividual lives ; and the future is a reality through it. If humanity 
were to disappear and no future be possible, we should lose our reck- 
oning, along with our sense of values, like Browning's Lazarus, who 
has had a vision of eternity, but has lost track of time. 

So it was in the millennial atmosphere of the early Church. 
However vaguely or definitely the triumph of "the Kingdom" was 
reckoned,^ the belief in its approach carried the mind away from 

^ The conception of a millennium, drawn from the later Jewish literature, was 
that Christ and his saints would rule for a thousand years ; but in spite of much cal- 
culation the belief was never quite reduced to successful mathematics. It is inter- 
esting, in passing, to see how it drew upon that other interest in chronology, the plot- 
ting out of a future instead of a past, which astrology best illustrates. In fact the 
millennium may be said to be a sort of Christian equivalent for astrology. In the 
earlier prophets the Messianic Kingdom is to last forever (c/. Ezekiel 37^^ etc.), a con- 
ception found also in the apostolic age (John 12"). Jeremiah, however, had risked 
a prophecy of Jewish delivery from captivity at the end of seventy years (25^^), but 
when his dream of deliverance was not realized the later prophets had to find an ex- 
planation, and apocalyptic literature developed a reckoning which should save the 
validity of the earlier. This was definitely the occasion of Daniel's attempt (9), which 
has taxed the mathematics of every apocalyptic dreamer to the present day. The 
conception of a thousand years came late, and perhaps rests on very extended use of 
symbolic interpretation. According to Psalms 90*, a day with God is as a thousand 
years. Combine this with the six days of Creation in Genesis and by analogy the 



284 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

earthly affairs and their history. Men who drew their inspiration 
from it had but httle interest in the splendor of a Roman state or 
in the long procession of centuries in which were painfuUy evolved 
the institutions of pagan law and government, institutions which 
not only safeguarded the heritage of antique culture but made pos- 
sible the extension of Christianity. 

The only history of importance to the Christian was that which 
justified his faith, and it all lay within the sacred writings of the 
Jews. So, as the vision of the judgment day became fainter and 
the Church proceeded to settle itself in time and not in eternity, 
it looked back to a different past from that which lay beyond the 
pagan world. The sacred scriptures of the Jews had replaced the 
literature of antiquity. A revolution was taking place in the his- 
tory of History. Homer and Thucydides, Polybius and Livy, the 
glory of the old regime, shared a common fate. The scientific out- 
put of the most luminous minds the world had known was classed 
with the legends that had grown up by the campfires of primitive 
barbarians. All was pagan ; which meant that all was delusive and 
unreliable except where it could be tested in the light of the new 
rehgion or where it forced itself by the needs of life into the world 
of common experience. 

There is no more momentous revolution in the history of thought 
than this, in which the achievements of thinkers and workers, of 

world's work will go on for six such days, or six thousand years, and then the Messiah will 
reign for a Sabbath of a thousand years. This idea is found only once in the Talmud. 
It was developed for Christians in Revelation (c/. 20^, " They lived and reigned with 
Christ a thousand years"). Through Jewish and Christian apocalypses the doctrine 
was taken up, sometimes with, sometimes without, the mathematical data. By the 
middle of the second century it began to subside, and although Montanism in the 
early third century revived it, it was henceforth regarded as somewhat tinged with 
heresy and Judaism. In the learned circles, Neoplatonic mysticism, as taught by 
Origen, superseded the crudities of the millennistic faith. "It was only the chronol- 
ogists and historians of the church who, following Julius Africanus, made use of apoc- 
aljT^tic numbers in their calculations, while court theologians like Eusebius enter- 
tained the imperial table with discussions as to whether the dining-haU of the em- 
peror — the second David and Solomon, the beloved of God — might not be the new 
Jerusalem of John's Apocalypse." (A. Hamack, article Millennium in Encyclo- 
Padia Britannica. This article furnishes an admirable survey and bibliography. 
See the treatment of Christian eschatology in the various works of R. H. Charles in 
the field of apocalyptic literature.) 



THE NEW ERA 285 

artists, philosophers, poets, and statesmen, were given up for the 
revelation of prophets and a gospel of worldly renunciation. The 
very success of the revolution blinds us to its significance ; for our 
own world-view has been moulded by it. Imagine, for instance, what 
the perspectives of history would have been had there been no Chris- 
tianity, or if it had remained merely a sect of Judaism, to be ignored 
or scorned ! Religion carried history away from the central themes 
of antiquity to a nation that had little to ofifer — except the re- 
ligion. 

The story of Israel could not, from the very nature of its situa- 
tion, be more than an incident in the drama of nations. The great 
empires of the east lay on either side of it, and the land of promise 
turned out to be a pathway of conquering armies. From the desert 
beyond Jordan new migrations of Semite nomads moved in for the 
plunder of the Jews, as the Jews themselves had plundered the land 
before. On the west, Phihstine and Phoenician held the harbors and 
the sea. Too small a nation for a career of its own, exposed and 
yet secluded, the borderer of civilization, Israel could produce no 
rich culture like its more fortunately situated neighbors. When 
unmolested for a time, it too could achieve rapid progress in its 
fortress towns. But no sooner was its wealth a temptation than the 
Assyrian was at the gates. It is small wonder, then, if in spite of 
the excellence of much of the historical literature embedded in the 
Old Testament, even the best of it, such as the stories woven around 
the great days of Saul and David, when compared with the narrative 
of Polybius or even with that of Herodotus, leaves the picture of 
petty kinglets of an isolated tribe, reaching out for a brief interval 
to touch the splendors of Tyre and Sidon, and vaguely aware of 
the might and wealth of Egypt. 

The main contribution of the Jews to the world was in a field 
which offers history few events to chronicle. As we have insisted 
above, it was a contribution of the first magnitude, to be treasured 
by succeeding ages above all the arts and sciences of antiquity. But 
its very superiority lay in its unworldUness, in its indifference to the 
passing fortunes of man or nations which make up the theme of 
history. This, at least, was the side of Judaism which Christianity 
seized upon and emphasized. But there could be little for history 
in any case in a religion born of national disaster and speaking by 



286 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

revelation. The religion which is born of disaster must either falsify 
reahties by a faith which reads victory in defeat or it must 
take refuge in the realm of the spirit, where the triumphs of 
the world, its enemy, are met with indifference or scorn. In either 
case the perspective is distorted. Revelation may save the future 
by stirring hope and awakening confidence ; but with the same calm 
authority with which it dictates the conduct of the present, it will 
falsify the past, — falsify, that is, in the eyes of science. In its own 
eyes it is lord of circumstance and master of phenomena ; and the 
records of the centuries must come to its standards, not it to theirs. 

It was, therefore, a calamity for historiography, that the new 
standards won the day. The authority of a revealed religion sanc- 
tioned but one scheme of history through the vast and intricate 
evolution of the antique world. A well-nigh insurmountable ob- 
stacle was erected to scientific inquiry, one which has at least taken 
almost nineteen centuries to surmount. 

Not only was the perspective perverted, and the perversion made 
into a creed, but the stern requirements of monotheistic theology 
placed a veritable barrier against the investigation. The Christian 
historian was not free to question the data as presented to him, 
since the source was inspired. He might sometimes evade the 
difficulty by reading new meanings into the data and so square them 
with the rest of history, a device employed by every Father of the 
Church whose erudition and insight brought him face to face with 
the difficulties of literal acceptance of the scriptures. But however 
one might twist the texts, the essential outlines of the scheme of 
history remained fixed. From the prophets of Jahveh with their 
high fanaticism and from Paul, the prophet of Jesus, there was but 
one world- view, that dominated by the idea of a chosen people and 
a special dispensation. The only difference between Jew^ish and 
Christian outlook was that what had been present politics became 
past history. The apostle to the Gentiles did not give up the Jew- 
ish past. Pre-Christian history was in his eyes the same narrow 
story of exclusive providence as it was in the eyes of the older 
prophets. Gentiles had had no share in the dispensations of 
Jahveh ; it was only for the present and future that they might 
hope to enter into the essential processes of historical evolution. 
The past to Paul was what it was to a Pharisee. 



THE NEW ERA 287 

This exclusive attitude of Christianity with reference to the past 
was in striking contrast with the attitude of contemporaneous pagan- 
ism, which was growing liberal with increasing knowledge. To 
attack the story of Jahveh's governance of the world was, for a 
Christian, sacrilege, since the story itself was sacred. A pagan, with 
a whole pantheon to turn to, placed no such value upon any one 
myth and therefore was free to discount them all. His eternal 
salvation did not rest upon his belief in them ; and, moreover, he 
did not concern himself so much about his salvation in any case. 
When the belief in an immortality was bound up with the accept- 
ance of a scheme of history, the acceptance was assured. What is 
the dead past of other people's lives, when compared with the 
unending future of one's own? History yielded to the demands of 
eternity. 

Moreover in its emphasis upon the Messiahship of Jesus, Chris- 
tianity fastened upon one of the most exclusive aspects of Jewish 
thought. Such history as the proof of this claim involved was along 
the line of a narrow, fanatic, national movement. Christianity, it is 
true, opened the Messianic Kingdom to the whole world, but it 
justified its confidence in the future by an appeal to the stricter out- 
lines of a tribal faith in the past. And yet that appeal, in spite of 
its limitations, was the source of such historical research as Chris- 
tianity produced. For, when pressed by pagan critics to reconcile 
their claims with those of Greeks or Egyptians, the Fathers were 
obliged to work out not merely a theory of history — their theology 
supplied them with that — but a scheme of chronology. The 
simple problem, so hghtly attacked, as to whether Moses or the 
Greeks should have the priority as lawgiver forced the apologists 
to some study of comparative history. While in this particular 
issue they had a somewhat easy triumph,^ there was a danger, which 
is obvious to us now, in too much reliance upon the chronology 
of the Old Testament, and especially in placing an emphasis upon 
the hteral text. The trenchant criticism of their opponents, there- 
fore, led the Fathers to adopt that allegorical type of interpreta- 
tion, which they learned from the Greeks themselves, and which is 

* One of the earliest and best short statements of this claim is that made by Tatian 
in his Address to the Greeks, Chap. XXXI sqij. It is strikingly in line with Josephus' 
protest in Against Apion. 



288 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

so useful wherever there is a need for holding fast to a text while 
letting the meaning go. We shall, therefore, find the chief develop- 
ments of Christian historiography during the first three centuries 
followmg these two lines of allegory and symbolism on the one 
hand and of comparative chronology on the other. 



CHAPTER XXV 
ALLEGORY AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 

In spite of what has been said as to the weakness of Christian 
historiography, it is possible to maintain the thesis that, among 
reUgions, Christianity is especially notable as resting essentially 
on a historical basis. 

In so far as Christianity was a historical religion, that was due, 
as has just been said, to the Messianic element in it. Indeed it can 
be said to have claimed from the beginning that it was a historical 
religion — a fulfilment of history, one fitting itself into the scheme 
of social and political evolution in a particular state. The apostles 
themselves, in their earliest appeal, demanded that one "search 
the scriptures" — a demand unique in the founding of rehgions. 
There is a vast difference, however, between studying history and 
studying historically. That they did study it, the one fact that 
the Christians retained the Old Testament is ample evidence. 
That they failed to deal with it adequately, the New Testament 
is also ample evidence. But since the Christian Messiah was 
offered to the whole world as well as to the Jews, Christian his- 
toriography had two main tasks before it : it had to place the life 
of Jesus in the history of the Jews, and, also, to show its setting in 
the general history of antiquity. The latter problem was not forced 
upon the Church until the pagan world began to take the new 
religion seriously, and its answer is found in the works of the great 
apologists. The relation of Christianity to Judaism, however, the 
Messianic problem proper, was of vital importance from the be- 
ginning, for it involved the supreme question whether or not Jesus 
was the one in whom the prophecies were fulfilled.^ 

' The coming of the Messiah was the main continuation of Jewish national his- 
tory. Messiahship was to the Jews of the time of Christ the embodiment of somewhat 
the same thought as stirred the Frenchman of the close of the nineteenth century at 

289 



290 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

One "searched the scriptures," therefore, for the evidences of 
the signs by which the advent could be recognized. The invitation 
to search them was, in appearance at least, a challenge to a scien- 
tific test, that of verification. If the data of the life of Jesus cor- 
responded with the details of the promises, there was a proof that 
the promises had been fulfilled. But since the fulfilment was not 
literal, the interpretation could not be literal either. The spiritual 
Kingdom of the Messiah had to be constructed out of fragmentary 
and uncertain references, and the only satisfactory way to apply 
many of them was by symbolism and allegory. Modern critical 
scholarship has now discarded Messianic prophecy, on the 
basis that the texts so confidently cited as foretelling the 
life of Jesus had no such purpose in the minds of their au- 
thors. But orthodoxy has held, through all the history of the 
church, that the texts were applicable and that the proof was 
thereby established of the harmony of the old and the new 
dispensations. 

We cannot turn, however, to the problems of higher criticism. 
The significant thing for history-writing was the creation of what 
might be called a new genre — that of the allegorical interpretation 
of texts. The use of allegory to explain, or explain away, texts 
was not a creation of Christian historians, for the device was not 
unknown to pagan literature or philosophy. As far back as the 
sixth century B.C., Homer was interpreted allegorically by Theagenes 
of Rhegium, and pagan philosophy had constant recourse to alle- 
gory to harmonize myth with reason. The Jews too were past- 
masters in its use. We have seen how the allegorical interpretation 
of the Old Testament had been developed by the Jewish scholars, 
especially those of the Diaspora, who found themselves thrown 
into contact with gentile scholars and felt the need of harmonizing 
Greek thought with their own intellectual heritage ; we have seen to 
what extent it was carried in the writings of the greatest Jewish phi- 

the recollection of 1870 and the lost provinces, or lent such inspiration in embittered 
Poland to the prophet-like poetry of Mickiewicz. It was the dream of a deliverer, a 
belief strengthened rather than crushed by failure and disaster. The whole sad 
drama of Jewish history may be said to have concentrated its expression in the Mes- 
sianic hope — a hope against hope itself. Christianity in offering itself as the reali- 
zation of that hope was stepping into a definite place in Jewish history, but it was a 
place to which the Jewish nation as a whole has never admitted it. 



ALLEGORY AND CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 291 

losopher of antiquity, Philo of Alexandria.^ But it is to be found as 
well in the Old Testament itself, especially in the prophetic litera- 
ture, where it runs alongside that elusive trace of the unattained 
which gave the prophecies their fascinating charm. One could 
trace it back farther still to the mind of primitive man, where 
symbol and reality are often confused into a single impression. 
But in the hands of the Christian theologians, symbolism emerged 
from the background of thought to dominate the whole situation. 
The story of realities depended upon the interpretation of the 
unrealities ; and that story of realities was nothing short of a his- 
tory of the world itself. 

The greatest master of Christian allegory was Origen, the Alex- 
andrine Greek, who, in the third century, contributed so much 
to the formulation of a scheme of theology for the Fathers of the 
Church. Origen was a scholar as well as a philosophic thinker, 
and it was his work on the text of the Bible, to which reference 
has been made above, which won for him the praise of one so unlike 
him in point of view as St. Jerome. In that limited gallery of 
illustrious men which St. Jerome has left for us, the De Viris Illus- 
tribus, Origen stands out clearly : ^ 

" Who is there, he asks, who does not know that he was so assiduous in the 
study of Holy Scriptures, that contrary to the spirit of his time, and of his 
people, he learned the Hebrew language, and taking the Septuagint translation, 
he gathered in a single work the other translations also, namely those of Aquila 
of Ponticus the Proselyte, and Theodotian the Ebonite, and Symmachus an 
adherent of the same sect who wrote commentaries also on the gospel according 
to Matthew, from which he tried to establish his doctrine. And besides these, 
a fifth, sixth, and seventh translation, which we also have from his library, he 
sought out with great diligence, and compared with other editions. And since 
I have given a list of his works in the volumes of letters which I have written 

^ The influence of Philo upon the Christian Fathers is a matter of great interest. 
The admiration of speculative minds for the Jewish thinker is echoed in the com- 
ment which Eusebius prefixes to his list of the works of Philo (Historia Ecclcsiastica, 
Bk. II, Chap. XVIII) : " Copious in language, comprehensive in thought, sublime and 
elevated in his views of divine Scripture, Philo has produced manifold and various 
expositions of the sacred books." (A. C. McGifEert's translation in the Library of 
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.) 

2 Jerome, De Viris Illustrihus, Chap. LIV. Also in the preface of his De Nominibus 
Bebraicis, Jerome speaks of him as, "Origen, whom all but the ignorant acknowledge 
as the greatest teacher of the churches, next to the Apostles." 



292 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

to Paula, in a letter which I wrote against the works of Varro, I pass this by 
now, not failing, however, to make mention of his immortal genius, how that 
he understood dialectics, as well as geometry, arithmetic, music, granmiar, and 
rhetoric, and taught all the schools of philosophers, in such wise that he had also 
diligent students in secular literature, and lectured to them daily, and the 
crowds which flocked to him were marvellous. These, he received in the hope 
that through the instrumentahty of this secular literature, he might establish 
them in the faith of Christ." 

This tribute by Jerome summarizes the lengthy account of 
Origen by Eusebius in the sixth book of the Ecclesiastical History 
to which we may still turn for a full account of the life and influence 
of one who, while not a historian in the stricter sense, contributed 
to Christian historiography one of its most remarkable chapters. 

Origen was as courageous in his interpretations as he was 
thorough in his scholarship. He not only denied the literal truth 
of much of Genesis, and explained away the darker happenings 
in the history of Israel ; but, even in the New Testament, he treated 
as parables or fables such stories as that of the Devil taking Jesus 
up into a high mountain and showing him the kingdoms of the 
world. One reads Origen with a startle of surprise. The most 
learned of the Fathers of the third century was a modern.^ His 
commentaries upon the Bible might almost pass for the product of 
the nineteenth century. The age of Lyell and Darwin has seen 
the same effort of mystic orthodoxy to save the poem of Creation, 
by making the six days over into geological eras and the story of 
Adam and Eve a symbol of human fate. Many a sermon upon the 
reconciliation of science and religion — that supreme subject of 
modern sermons — might be taken almost bodily from Origen. 
For his problem was essentially like that which fronts the modern 
theologian ; he had to win from a rationalism which he respected, 
the denial of its inherent skepticism. Like Philo, a resident of that 
cosmopoUtan centre, Alexandria, that meeting-place of races and 
religions, Origen was a modern among moderns. He was a Greek 
of subtlest intellect and vast erudition, one of the finest products 
of the great Hellenic dispersion.^ 

Interpretation of the scriptures by allegory is not, in Origan's 

* Too modem to be entirely orthodox. Hence his subsequent eclipse. 

* Cf. Eusebius, Historia Ecdesiastica, Bk. VI, for details of Origen's life. 



ALLEGORY AND CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 293 

eyes, an unwarranted liberty. The scriptures themselves sanction 
it — allegorically ! There is a "hidden and secret meaning," he 
says, "in each individual word, the treasure of divine wisdom being 
hid in the vulgar and unpolished vessels of words ; as the apostle 
also points out when he says, 'We have this treasure in earthen 
vessels.' " ^ Quaintly naive as such reasoning seems when based 
upon a single text, its weakness becomes its strength when sufficient 
texts are adduced to convey the impression that the scriptures 
themselves do really proclaim their own symbolic character. This 
Origen endeavors to do. "If the law of Moses had contained 
nothing which was to be understood as having a secret meaning, 
the prophet would not have said in his prayer to God : ' Open thou 
mine eyes and I will behold wondrous things out of thy law ' " (Psalms 
119^^). What, he asks, can one make out of the prophecy of 
Ezekiel except allegorically ? ^ Prophetic literature implies alle- 
gory in its very structure. But the strongest proof of the legiti- 
macy of allegorical interpretation is its use in the New Testament, 
and so largely by St. Paul.^ 

The modern critic sees the vicious circle in which such reason- 
ing moves. But he sees it because he denies the hidden meaning, 
the secret lore, which to the "intellectuals" of the third century 
was the real heart of phenomena. Symbolism has deeper roots 
than one suspects. The mysterious efficacy of numbers is as wide 
as savagery ; the secret value of words is a doctrine as universal as 
speech. They come from untold ages beyond Pythagoras or Hera- 
cleitus. The Christian emphasis upon the logos — "the word 
which became God and the word which was God" — but put the 
stamp of supreme authority upon a phase of thought intelligible 
to all antiquity. Gnosticism took hold of that phase, and by 
insisting upon an inner doctrine which was concealed from the 
uninitiated, attempted to harmonize Christianity with the parallel 
cults of paganism. Neo-platonism was doing much the same for 
paganism itself. The cults of Asia and Egypt were drawn to- 
gether and interpreted in the light of the worship of Demeter or 
Dionysus. Origen's point of view is not so naive as it seems. It 

* Origen, De Principiis, Bk. IV, Chap. I, Sect. 7. 

* Origen, Contra Celsum, Bk. IV, Chap. L. 
» Ibid., Bk. IV, Chap. XLIX. 



294 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

was in line with that of his age. The world was becoming one, and 
yet at the same time it was a medley of different and divergent 
civilizations. The only way the ancient could think of overcoming 
this antithesis between an ideal which sought for unity and phenom- 
ena which differed was by denying the essential nature of the differ- 
ences. We should do the same if it were not for our hypothesis of 
evolution and the historical attitude of mind. Only when one sees the 
impasse into which the thinkers of antiquity were forced, in their 
attempts to syncretize a complex and varying world, does one 
realize by contrast what a tremendous implement of synthesis the 
evolutionary hypothesis supplies. The only alternative method 
by which to realize the harmony which does not appear is by sym- 
bolism. 

If we once grant that texts are not what they seem, there is 
only one way to learn their true meaning. We must find a key, and 
that key must be some supreme fact, some fact so large that the 
content of the text seems but incidental to it. Christianity sup- 
plied such a clue to the interpretation of the Old Testament ; and 
the Old Testament, upon its side, supplied Christianity with the 
authority of a long antiquity. The value of that antiquity for the 
basis of a story of obscure, recent happenings in Jerusalem was 
felt by all apologists, and has been a convincing argument until the 
present. It was left for the nineteenth century to substitute for 
symbolism the tests of historical criticism, and thus to see the 
whole scheme of allegorical theological interpretation fade away. 
But we should not forget that, false as it seems to us in both method 
and results, the symbolic method made the theologian somewhat 
of a historian in spite of himself ; and we should not expect of the 
savant of the third century the historical and evolutionary attitude 
of today — which was, so far as we can see, his only alternative. 

Symbolism may twist the texts ; but a mind like Origen's does 
not miss the essential point that the texts must be there to twist. 
Nothing is more interesting in the historiography of early Chris- 
tianity than to see how Origen came to realize, after all, the paucity 
of his sources and their inadequacy, particularly those dealing with 
the history of Christianity itself. He shows this with scholarly 
frankness in a passage in his famous apology, Against Celsus. Celsus 
was a pagan Greek who wrote the most notable attack upon Chris- 



ALLEGORY AND CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 295 

tianity of which we have record from those early times. His 
treatise was a powerful and learned criticism of the Christian 
writings and teachings, especially emphasizing their unscientific 
character and the credulity of those who believed in them. Origen's 
reply reveals in more places than one how in him a genuine his- 
torical critic was lost in the theologian. To illustrate : Celsus had 
claimed that before writing his attack he had taken the trouble to 
acquaint himself with all the Christian doctrines and writings. 
Origen, drawing on his prodigious knowledge of the Bible, shows 
time and again what a superficial acquaintance it had been — that 
is, judged according to Origen's method of interpretation. But 
when Celsus charges the Christians with obscurantism, stating that 
their teachers generally tell him not to investigate, while at the 
same time exhorting him to believe, Origen takes another tack.^ 
He is apparently a little ashamed of the emphasis taken from 
reason and placed upon faith by his Christian colleagues. He does 
not actually say as much, but he reminds Celsus that all men have 
not the leisure to investigate. After this weak admission, how- 
ever, he turns round, in what is one of the most interesting passages 
of patristic writing, and demands if Celsus and the pagans do not 
follow authority as well. Have not Stoics and Plato nists a teacher 
too, whose word they go back to ? Celsus believes in an uncreated 
world and that the flood (Deucalion's) is a fairly modern thing.^ 
But what authority has he ? The dialogues of Plato ? But Moses 
saw more clearly than Plato. He was in incomparably better 
position to be informed. Why not prefer the account of Moses? 
The value of a controversy is that each side sees the other's 
weak points. It seldom results in admitting the inferiority of 
one's own position ; but once in a while a fair-minded man will be 
courageous enough to state that, through no fault of his own, he is 
unable to be more accurate than his opponent. This is about what 
Origen does, in taking up the charge of Celsus that the narrative 
of the baptism in the Jordan is so improbable a story as to require 

^ Cf. ibid., Bk. I, Chaps. XII and X. The order of citations has been reversed 
here for clarity. 

2 Celsus also had the idea of a common evolution of ideas and customs and of 
the borrowings of one nation from another, e.g., circumcision from Egypt, ibid., Bk. I, 
Chap. XXn. 



296 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

confirmation of first-hand witnesses, before he as a thinking pagan 
could accept it. In reply Origen frankly admits the paucity of 
sources for the history of Christianity; but demands to know if 
Celsus is willing to give up pagan history because it contains im- 
probable incidents. The passage is worth quoting, for it shows how 
the most learned of all the Fathers, the most subtle and compre- 
hensive intellect, with one exception, which Christianity enlisted to 
its cause, recognized the weakness of Christian historiography but 
failed to see how it could be remedied : 

" Before we begin our reply we have to remark that the endeavour to show 
with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred, and 
to produce an intelligent conception regarding it, is one of the most difficult 
undertakings that can be attempted, and is in some instances an impossibility. 
For suppose that some one were to assert that there never had been any Trojan 
War, chiefly on account of the impossible narrative interwoven therewith, about 
a certain Achilles being the son of a sea-goddess Thetis and of a man Peleus, 
or Sarpedon being the son of Zeus, or Ascalaphus and lalmenus the sons of Ares, 
or JEneas that of Aphrodite, how should we prove that such was the case, espe- 
cially under the weight of the fiction attached, I know not how, to the univer- 
sally prevalent opinion that there was really a war in Ilium between Greeks and 
Trojans ? And suppose, also, that some one disbelieved the story of CEdipus and 
Jocasta, and of their two sons Eteocles and Polynices, because the sphinx, a kind 
of half-virgin, was introduced into the narrative, how should we demonstrate the 
reality of such a thing ? And in like manner also with the history of the Epi- 
goni, although there is no such marvellous event interwoven with it, or with the 
return of the Heracleidae, or countless other historical events. But he who deals 
candidly with histories, and would wish to keep himself also from being imposed 
upon by them, will exercise his judgment as to what statements he will give his 
assent to, and what he will accept figuratively, seeking to discover the meaning 
of the authors of such inventions, and from what statements he will withhold his 
belief, as having been written for the gratification of certain individuals. And 
we have said this by way of anticipation respecting the whole history related 
in the Gospels concerning Jesus, not as inviting men of acuteness to a simple 
and unreasoning faith, but wishing to show that there is need of candour in 
those who are to read, and of much investigation, and, so to speak, of insight 
into the meaning of the writers, that the object with which each event has been 
recorded may be discovered." ^ 

In so many words Origen admits that since the sources for 
Christian history cannot be checked up by external evidence, there 

^ Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. XLII. (F. Crombie's translation in the Ante-Nicene Chris- 
tian Library.) 



ALLEGORY AND CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 297 

is nothing left but to accept their main outlines on faith — the same 
faith the Greek has in the existence of Troy or the Roman in the early- 
kings. But being a Greek — and above all a Greek in argument — he 
qualifies his faith by reason and explains away what seems improb- 
able. In a way, therefore, we have before us a sort of sophisticated 
Herodotus after all, who eliminates myth to suit his perspective.^ 

^ In addition to Celsus, Porphyry entered the lists against Origen from the pagan 
side. Of his attack, the following extract, quoted, with cautionary comment, by 
Eusebius in the sixth book (Chap. XTX) of the Hisloria Ecdesiastica (A. C. McGiffert's 
translation), is worth repeating as an indication of the controversial atmosphere in 
which we are here moving : 

"' Some persons [says Porphyry], desiring to find a solution of the baseness of 
the Jewish Scriptures rather than abandon them, have had recourse to explanations 
inconsistent and incongruous with the words written, which explanations, instead 
of supplying a defense of the foreigners, contain rather approval and praise of them- 
selves. For they boast that the plain words of Moses are enigmas, and regard them 
as oracles full of hidden mysteries ; and having bewildered the mental judgment by 
folly, they make their explanations.' Farther on he says: 'As an example of this 
absurdity take a man whom I met when I was young, and who was then greatly cele- 
brated and still is, on account of the writings which he has left. I refer to Origen, 
who is highly honoured by the teachers of these doctrines. For this man, having 
been a hearer of Ammonius, who had attained the greatest proficiency in philosophy 
of any in our day, derived much benefit from his teacher in the knowledge of the 
sciences ; but as to the correct choice of life, he pursued a course opposite to his. For 
Ammonius, being a Christian, and brought up by Christian parents, when he gave 
himself to study and to philosophy straightway conformed to the life required by the 
laws. But Origen, having been educated as a Greek in Greek literature, went over to 
the barbarian recklessness. And carrying over the learning which he had obtained, 
he hawked it about, in his life conducting himself as a Christian and contrary to the 
laws, but in his opinions of material things and of the Deity being like a Greek, and 
mingling Grecian teachings with foreign fables. For he was continually studying 
Plato, and he busied himself with the writings of Numenius and Cronius, Apollophanes, 
Longinus, Moderatus, and Nicomachus, and those famous among the Pythagoreans. 
And he used the books of Chaeremon the Stoic, and of Cornutus. Becoming ac- 
quainted through them with the figurative interpretation of the Grecian mysteries, he 
applied it to the Jewish Scriptures.' 

"These things are said by Porphyry in the third book of his work against the 
Christians. He speaks truly of the industry and learning of the man, but plainly 
utters a falsehood (for what will not an opposer of Christians do ?) when he says that 
he went over from the Greeks, and that Ammonius fell from a life of piety into heathen 
customs. For the doctrine of Christ was taught to Origen by his parents, as we have 
shown above. And Ammonius held the divine philosophy unshaken and unadul- 
terated to the end of his life. His works yet extant show this, as he is celebrated 
among many for the writings which he has left. For example, the work entitled 'The 
Harmony of Moses and Jesus, ' and such others as are in the possession of the learned. 
These things are suflBcient to evince the slander of the false accuser, and also the pro- 
ficiency of Origen in Grecian learning." 



298 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Had the Christian world been and remained as sophisticated 
as Origen, the conception of biblical history for the next fiiteen 
hundred years would have been vastly different. But, although 
the allegorical method of biblical interpretation was used by nearly 
all the Fathers — by none more than by the pope whose influence 
sank deepest into the Middle Ages, Gregory the Great — arid still 
forms the subject of most sermons, the symbolism and allegory 
came to be applied less to those passages which contained the narra- 
tive, than to the moralizing and prophetic sections. The stories of 
the Creation, of the Flood, of Joseph, of the plagues in Egypt, of 
Sodom and Gomorrah, were not explained away. But about them, 
and the rest of that high theme of the fortunes of Israel, were woven 
the gorgeous dreams of every poetic imagination from Origen to 
Bossuet which had been steeped in miracle and rested upon au- 
thority. One turns to Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of the 
wonder-working Martin of Tours, for the Bible story as it reached 
the Middle Ages. The narrative of the Old Testament was taken 
literally, like that of the New ; the story of a primitive people was 
presented to a primitive audience. Allegory was not allowed to 
explain away passages which would have shocked the critical intel- 
ligence of Hellenic philosophers, for those were the very passages 
most likely to impress the simple-minded Germans for whose edu- 
cation the church itself was to be responsible. 

There was, however, a better reason than mere credulous 
simplicity why Jewish and Christian history were not allegorized 
away. It was because that history had been made credible by an 
exhaustive treatment of chronology. Christian scholars took up 
the task of reconciling the events of Jewish history with the annals 
of other histories, and worked into a convincing and definite scheme 
of parallel chronology the narrative from Abraham to Christ. 
Mathematics was applied to history — not simply to the biblical 
narrative but all that of the ancient world — and out of the chaos 
of fact and legend, of contradiction and absurdity, of fancy run riot 
and unfounded speculation, there was slowly hammered into shape 
that scheme of measured years back to the origins of Israel and then 
to the Creation, which still largely prevails today. This is one of 
the most important things ever done by historians. Henceforth, 
for the next fifteen centuries and more, there was one sure path 



ALLEGORY AND CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN 299 

back to the origin of the worid, a path along the Jewish past, 
marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation. 
An account of how this came about wUl carry us back into that 
complicated problem of the measurement of time, which we have 
considered before, in its general aspects. Now, however, we come 
upon the work of those who gave us our own time-reckoning, and 
who in doing so moulded the conception of world history for the 
western world more, perhaps, than any other students or masters 
of history. 



CHAPTER XXVI 
CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY; EUSEBIUS 

The history of History repeats itself. Tradition and myth, epic 
and genealogy, priestly lore of world eras and the marking of time, 
criticism and history follow each other or fuse in the long evolution 
of that rational self-consciousness which projects itself into the past 
as it builds up the synthesis of the present. Similar pathways 
lie behind all developed historiographies. Indeed, the parallel 
between the histories of the History of different nations is so close 
as to rob the successive chapters of much of the charm of novelty. 
When we have reviewed the historiography of Greece, that of 
Rome strikes us as familiar. The same likeness lies already in 
the less developed historiographies of Oriental cultures. They all 
emerge from a common base ; and, to use a biological expression, 
ontogeny repeats phylogeny — the individual repeats the species. 
The law of growth seems to apply to history as though it were an 
organism with an independent evolution, instead of what it really 
is, a mere reflection of changing societies. 

The explanation apparently lies at hand, in the similar evolution 
of the societies which produce the history. But, from such premises 
one would hardly expect the historiography of a religion to exhibit 
the same general lines of development. Yet in the history of Chris- 
tian History we have much the same evolution of material as in that 
of Greece or Rome. Naturally, the priestly element is stronger, and 
the attempts at rationalizing the narratives more in evidence. But 
it is the absence rather than the presence of sophistication which 
strikes one most. The genealogies play their role for the kingdom 
of the Messiah as for the cities of Hellas,^ Hesiods of Jewish and 
Christian theology present their schemes of divinely appointed eras, 

1 Cf. Julius Africanus' pioneer work in this direction, in harmonizing the variant 
genealogies of Christ in the Gospel, quoted by Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk. I, 
Chap. VII. 

300 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 301 

and through the whole heroic period of the Church, legends of saints 
and martyrs furnish the unending epic of the unending war, where 
the hosts of heaven fought with men, not for a vanished Troy but 
for an eternal city. Finally, the work of Christian logographers in 
the apologists — and every theologian was an apologist — reduced the 
scheme to prose. The parallel would not hold, however, beyond the 
merest externals if it had not been for the development of Christian 
chronology ; for the thought of writing history was but little in the 
minds of theologians, and hardly more in those of martyrologists. 
From the apologists, face to face with the criticism of the unbeliev- 
ing world, came the demand for more rigid methods of comparative 
chronology, by which they could prove the real antiquity and direct 
descent of Christianity. The same kind of practical need had pro- 
duced similar, if more trivial, documentation by pagan priests and 
was later to repeat itself in mediaeval monasteries. So that in the 
Christian Church, as in the antique world generally, history proper 
was born of the application of research and chronology to meet the 
exacting demands of skepticism, as well as of the desire to set forth 
great deeds. 

The path to Christian historiography lies, therefore, through a 
study of Christian chronology. The basis for this was the work 
of the Jewish scholars of the Diaspora. When the Christian apolo- 
gists of the second and third centuries attempted to synchronize the 
Old Testament history with that of the gentiles, they could fall back 
upon the work of a Jewish scribe, Justus of Tiberius, who wrote in 
the reign of Hadrian.^ He prepared a chronicle of Jewish kings, 
working along the same uncertain basis of ''generations" as had 
been used in gentile chronicles, and so claiming for Moses an an- 
tiquity greater than that of the oldest figures in Greek legend. The 
difficulties in the way of any counter proof lent this statement great 
value in argument, especially since it was merely a mathematical 
formulation of a belief already established in the Church. But, 
although the argument of priority was familiar from early days, 
the first formally prepared Christian chronology did not appear 
until the middle of the third century when Julius Africanus wrote 
his Chronographia. It was a work in five books, drawing upon the 

' The connection of Christian chronology with that of the Greeks, e.g. Castor, 
has been referred to above. Vide Eusebius, Chronicorum Liber Primtis. 



302 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

writings of Josephus, Manetho and pagan scholars, and arranging 
the eras of the old dispensation in a series symbolical of creation 
itself. The duration of the world is to reach six thousand years, after 
which is to come a thousand-year Sabbath. The birth of Christ is 
put five thousand five hundred years from Adam, which leaves five 
hundred more before the end. Halfway along this stretch of cen- 
turies, three thousand years from the creation, we come upon the 
death of Palek, under whom the world was parcelled out, as is 
recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter of Genesis.^ 

A scheme hke this is a chronology only by courtesy ; and yet a 
glance at the dating along the pages of the authorized edition of the 
Bible will show how relatively close to it has been the accepted 
dating of the world's history down to our own time. Critically con- 
sidered, it was merely a variation of the symbolism of Origen — an 
allegory of the general scheme of history instead of an allegory of 
details. It was symbolism on a bolder and larger scale, all the more 
convincing because, while it supplied the framework for events it did 
not have to harmonize or explain them away. Three main influ- 
ences made for its success. The absence of any continuous Jewish 
chronology offered it open field ; theology demanded that the world's 
history should centre upon the fife of Christ and the coming of the 
kingdom ; and the idea of world eras was just in fine with the ideas 
of pagan savants who had attained a rude conception of natural law 
in the movement of history. A treatment of history which could 
appeal to the great name of Varro for its pagan counterpart was 
not Hghtly to be rejected. The best minds of antiquity saw — 
though dimly — the outer world as a reflection of the human reason ; 
but what Platonic idea ever mastered recalcitrant phenomena so 
beautifully as this scheme of Christian history with its symmetry 
established by a divine mathematics? 

One is tempted to turn aside to the absorbing problems of phi- 
losophy which these crude solutions of world history open up. But 
before us stands a great figure, a Herodotus among the logographers 
of the early Church. Eusebius of Caesarea, the Father of Church 
History, worked out from materials Kke these the chronology of the 
world which was to be substantially that of all the subsequent his- 

* See the monumental study of H. Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus . . . , which 
has disentangled the fragile threads of his chronology as preserved in various ways. 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 303 

tory of Europe to our own time, and preserved the precious frag- 
ments of his predecessors in the first history of Christianity.^ 

Eusebius meets the two qualifications which Polybius prescribed 
as indispensable for the historian. He was a man of affairs, of wide 
knowledge of the world, and held high oflSice in the state whose 
fortunes he described. He it was who at the great council of Nicaea 
(325 A.D.) sat at the right hand of Constantine and delivered the 
opening oration in honor of the emperor.^ Few historians of either 
church or state have ever had more spectacular tribute paid to their 
learning and judicial temper. For it was apparently these two 
qualities which especially equipped Eusebius for so distinguished an 
honor. At least one likes to think so ; but perhaps the distinction 
fell to him because he was as well an accomplished courtier and as 
much the apologist of Constantine as of the Christian faith. 

This incident fixes for us the life of Eusebius. Born about 260 
A.D., he was at the fulness of his powers when the Church gained its 
freedom, and he hved on until 339 or 340. He had studied in the 
learned circle of Pamphilus of Caesarea, whose great library was to 
furnish him with many of his materials,^ and there came under the 
spell of Origen, whose influence was supreme in the circle of 
Pamphilus. Nothing is more difl&cult in criticism than the estimate 
of one man's influence upon another — and nothing more light- 
heartedly hazarded. It would be hard to say what Eusebius would 
have been without the works of Origen to inspire him, but that they 
did influence him is beyond question. Eusebius was not an original 
thinker. He lacked the boldness of genius ; but to witness that bold- 
ness in Origen must have been an inspiration toward freedom from 
ecclesiasticism and traditionalism.'' His history is no mere bishop's 

» The name Eusebius was a very common one in the records of the early Church, 
There are forty Eusebiuses, contemporaries of the historian, noted in Smith and Wace's 
Dictionary of Christian Biography, and, in all, one hundred thirty-seven from the first 
eight centuries. Eusebius of Caesarea took the surname Pamphilus after the death 
of his master Pamphilus, out of respect for him. 

2 Cf. Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk. I, Chap. XIX. 

3 Cf. Eusebius, De Martyribus PdasHnae, Chap. IV; Jerome, De Viris Illustribus, 
Chaps. LXXV, LXXXI. 

* These at least are the two main influences of Origen upon Eusebius according 
to McGiffert and Heinrici. See A. C.McGiffert's edition of the Church History, p. 7. 
and C. F. G. Heinrici, Das Urchristentum in der Kirchengeschichte des Eusebius 
(1894). Heinrici here presents the case against F. Overbeck's view (ifber die Anfange 



304 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

history, it is the record of a religion as well as of a church. Its 
scholarship is critical, not credulous. From Origen, too, may have 
come the general conception which makes the first church history a 
chapter in the working out of a vast world-scheme, the "economy" 
of God.^ But the time had now come for such a conception to be 
commonplace. It was no longer a speculation ; the recognition by 
the empire was making it a fact. 

If one were to search for influences moulding the character 
of Eusebius' history this triumph of the Church would necessarily 
come first. No history of Christianity worthy of the name could 
well appear during the era of persecutions. Not that the persecu- 
tions were so severe or so continuous as has been commonly believed. 
Eusebius himself, for instance, Uved safely through the most severe 
persecution, and visiting Pamphilus in prison — for Pamphilus suf- 
fered martyrdom — carried on his theological works in personal touch 
with his master. But though the persecutions have been exagger- 
ated, the situation of the Church was not one to invite the historian. 
Constantine was its deliverer ; in a few years it passed from oppres- 
sion to power. And in the hour of its triumph Christian scholar- 
ship was to find, in a bishop high at court, a historian worthy not only 
of the great deeds of the saints and martyrs, but of the new imp)erial 
position of the Church. 

Eusebius was a voluminous writer, "historian, apologist, topog- 
rapher, exegete, critic, preacher, dogmatic writer." ^ But his fame 
as a historian rests upon two works, the Church History and the 
Chronicle. Both were epoch-making. The one has earned for the 
author the title of Father of Church History; the other set for 
Christendom its framework in the history of the world. 

The Chronicle was written first.^ It is composed of two parts, 
the Chronographia and the Chronological Canons. The first of 

der Kirchengeschichtsschreibung, 1892), that Eusebius follows the hieraxchical, epis- 
copal thread in a sort of constitutional history of the church. 

1 Cf. C. F. G. Heinrici, op. cit., p. 13. 

2 See Eusebius of Ccesarea by J. B. Lightfoot m Smith and Wace's Dictionary of 
Christian Biography. A brilliant article. 

' He already refers to it in the opening of his Historic Ecclesiastica, Bk. I, Chap. 
I, also in the Eclogae Propheticae, Bk. I, Chap. I, and in the Praeparatio Evangelica, 
Bk. X, Chap. IX, which were both written before 313. As the Chronicle, when 
it reached Jerome, was carried down to 325, it is conjectured that there may have 
been a second edition. 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 305 

these is an epitome of universal history in the form of excerpts from 
the sources, arranged nation by nation, along with an argument for 
the priority of Moses and the Bible. It is a source-book on the 
epochs of history, much like those in use today as manuals in our / 
colleges. The second part consists of chronological tables with * 
marginal comments. The various systems of chronology, Chaldaean, 
Greek, Roman, etc., are set side by side with a biblical chronology 
which carries one back to the creation, although the detailed and 
positive annals begin only with the birth of Abraham. The Canons 
therefore presents in a single, composite form the annals of all 
antiquity — at least all that was of interest to Christendom. It 
presented them in simplest mathematical form. Rows of figures 
marked the dates down the centre of the page ; on the right hand 
side was the column of profane history ; on the left hand the column 
of sacred history.^ 

The fate of this work is of peculiar interest. It is doubtful if 
any other history has ever exercised an influence comparable to that 
which it has had upon the western world ; yet not a single copy of 
the original text has survived ; the Latin west knew only the second 
part, and that in the hasty translation of Jerome. Modern research 
has unearthed a solitary Armenian translalion of the work as a 
whole, and modern scholars have compared this with the fragments 
preserved by Byzantine chronographers ^ until finally, in the open- 

1 In the present text some profane history notes are on the left side, but this was 
due to the fact that the comments on profane history were fuller than those on sacred 
history, and were crowded over for reasons of space. 

Eusebius was largely indebted for his plan to Castor, whom he invokes at the 
beginning and end of the lists for Sicyon, Argos and Athens. Cf. H. Gelzer, Sextus 
Julius Africanus . . . , Part II, pp. 63 sq. 

On the relations between Eusebius and Julius Africanus see H. Gelzer, op. cit., 
Part II, pp. 23-107. 

^ Especially Georgius Syncellus. These chronographers preserved such large 
extracts that Joseph Scaliger was able to risk a reconstruction of the text from them 
alone. Scaliger's first edition was published in 1606, the second edition in 1658. The 
Armenian version, with a Latin translation, was published at Venice in 1818 by 
J. B. Aucher. The text in Migne, that by Cardinal Mai (1833), is based upon 
this; but the classic work on the Chronicle is that of A. Schoene, Eusebi Chronicorum 
Libri Duo (Vol. I, 1875, Vol. II, 1866), while the Armenian text has recently 
been published with parallel German translation, by J. Karst in the great edition 
of Eusebius' works now appearing in the series, Die griechischen christlichen 
Schriflsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte. It has also the version of Jerome, edited 
by R. Helm. 



3o6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

ing of the twentieth century the work is again accessible — if only 
to the learned. If, however, recovery of the chronicle is a work of 
archaeological philology, like the recovery of an ancient ruin, yet 
all the time that it had lain buried this httle book of dates and 
comments had been determining the historical outlook of Europe.* 
For the next thousand years most histories were chronicles, and they 
were built after the model of Jerome's translation of Eusebius' 
Canons. Every mediaeval monastery that boasted of enough culture 
to have a scriptorium and a few literate monks, was connecting 
its own rather fabulous but fairly recent antiquity with the great 
antiquity of Rome and Judaea through the tables of Eusebius' 
/ arithmetic. 

This anonymous immortality of the great Chronicle is easily 
accounted for. It was not a work of literature, but of mathematics. 
Now mathematics is as genuine art as is literature, art of the most 
perfect type ; but its expression, for that very reason, is not in the 
variable terms of individual appreciations. It is not personal but 
universal. It does not deal with qualities but with numbers ; or at 
best it deals with qualities merely as the distinguishing elements in 
numbers. The structure is the thing, not the meaning nor character 
of the details. And the structure depends upon the materials. 
Hence there is httle that is Eusebian about Eusebius' Chronicle, 
except the chronicle itself. It has no earmarks of authorship like 
the style of a Herodotus or a Thucydides. But all the same its 
content was the universal possession of the succeeding centuries. 

There is, however, a simpler reason for the fate of Eusebius' 
Chronicle. It has a forbidding exterior. It had even too much 
mathematics and too much history for the Middle Ages ; they were 
satisfied with the results of the problem. But behind this forbid- 
ding exterior the modern scholar finds a synthesis of alluring charm. 
Parallel columns of all known eras extend up and down the pages ; 
eras of Abraham, David, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. It is 
interesting to see this tangle of columns simphfy as the diverse 
nations come and go ; and finally all sink into the great unity of 
Rome. At last the modern world of Eusebius' own time was left 

* Joseph Scaliger refers thus to the influence of Eusebius. "Qui post Eusebium 
scripserunt, omne scriptum de temporibus aridum esse censuerunt, quod non hujus 
fontibus irrigatum esset." (Quoted in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Gracae, Vol. XIX, p. 14.) 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 307 

but four columns, the years of Rome (A. U. C), of Olympiads, of 
Roman Consuls, and of Christ. The rest was already ancient his- 
tory. As one follows the sweep of these figures and watches the 
steady line of those events where the Providence of God bore down 
the forces of the unbeliever, one reaUzes that in this convincing 
statement lay the strongest of all defences of the faith. Here, com- 
pressed into a few pages, lies the evidence of history for the Chris- 
tian world-view. Origen's great conception that pagan history was 
as much decreed by Jehovah as sacred history finds in the Chronicle 
its most perfect expression ; the facts speak for themselves.^ No 
fickle Fortuna could ever have arranged with such deliberate aim 
the rise and fall of empires. History is the reservoir not of argu- 
ment but of proof, and the proof is mathematical. ^ 

The human element of humor, however, comes into the situation 
when one turns back to the opening paragraph and learns the atti- 
tude of Eusebius himself. "Now at the very beginning, I make 
this declaration before all the world : let no one ever arrogantly con- 
tend that a sure and thorough knowledge of chronology is attain- 
able. This every one will readily believe who ponders on the incon- 
trovertible words of the Master to his disciples : ' It is not for you to 
know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his 
own power' [Acts i ^]. For it seems to me that he, as Lord God, 
uttered that decisive word with reference not merely to the day 
of judgment, but with reference to all times, to the end that he 
might restrain those who devote themselves too boldly to such vain 
investigations." ' 

We have left ourselves little space for the work by which Euse- 

* This view of universal history places Eusebius on a distinctly higher plane 
than that of a mere apologist. It enabled him to have somewhat of the Herodotean 
sweep and breadth. Cf. C. F. G. Heinrici, op. cit., pp. 13 sqq. Eusebius, Historia 
Ecclesiastica, Bk. I, Chap. VII. 

* The translation of the Canons by Jerome, while apparently superior to the 
Armenian version, bears the marks of careless haste. He tells us himself (Preface, 
11. 13 sqq.) that it is an opus tumultuarium, and adds that he dictated it most hur- 
riedly to a scribe. He must have meant, so A. Schoene thinks (Die Wellchronik des 
Eusebius, 1900, p. 77), that he dictated the marginal comments, not the rows of figures. 
Likely a notarius translated the figures into Latin, and Jerome added the notes. 

A great deal of discussion has arisen over the fact that in the Ecclesiastical History 
Eusebius differs decidedly from the chronology of the Chronicle. 

* Eusebius, Ckronicorum Liber Primus, Preface. 



3o8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

bius is chiefly known, the Ecclesiastical History. So far as students 
of theology and church history are concerned, little space is needed, 
for the work itself is readily accessible and that, too, in an English 
edition, and magnificently translated.^ But the general student of 
history seldom reads church history now, and the achievement of 
Eusebius shares the common fate. Yet it is a great achievement, 
and a genuine surprise awaits the reader who turns to it. One 
might expect that the age of Constantine would produce a history 
of the obscure, unstoried institution which had suddenly risen to 
the splendor of an imperial church, but one could hardly expect 
to find out of that arena of fierce theological conflict the calm and 
lofty attitude of generous reserve and the sense of dominating 
scholarly obligation for accuracy which characterize the first church 
historian. The judgment of Gibbon, that the Ecclesiastical History 
was grossly unfair,^ is itself a prejudiced verdict. To be sure it 
lacks the purely scientific aim, it is apologetic. But Eusebius is not 
to be blamed for that ; the wonder is that he preserved so just a 
poise and so exacting a standard in view of the universal demands 
of his time. We should not forget that the apologetic tone of 
Christian historiography was also sanctioned by the pagan classics. 
Even Polybius had demanded that history be regarded as a thing 
of use, and Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus had appHed the maxim 
generously. Christian historiography should not bear the brunt 
of our dissatisfaction with what was the attitude of nearly all 
antiquity.' 

^ The Church History of Etisebitis by A. C. McGiffert, in the Library of Nicene and 
Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. I, pp. 81-403. The same volume contains 
a translation of the Life of Constantine by E. C. Richardson, and an exhaustive bib- 
liography. 

* The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (J. B. Bury's edition), Vol. II, p. 135 : 
"Eusebius, himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound 
to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of re- 
ligion;" adding in a footnote, "Such is the /air deduction from I: 82, and Z?e Mart. 
Palast. c. 12." 

' This point is well made by H. O. Taylor in The Mediceval Mind, Vol. I , pp. 78^81. 

At the same time Eusebius advances principles of historical composition against 
which it is well to be on one's guard, as for instance in the following extract, with 
reference to the divisions among the Churches : 

" But it is not our place to describe the sad misfortunes which finally came upon 
them, as we do not think it proper, moreover, to record their divisions and unnatural 
conduct to each other before the persecution. Wherefore we have decided to relate 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 309 

The task of Eusebius was a difl&cult one. Only those who have 
tried themselves to extract historical data from theological writings 
can appreciate how difficult it was ; but even they have an advan- 
tage over the Father of Church History. For now the principles 
of scientij&c, objective criticism of sources are well understood, 
and the historian can stand apart from the data aware that his 
criticism may be frankly skeptical without injury to his standards 
of religion. But Eusebius could not go far upon that path without 
arousing more serious doubts as to his general canons of beUef. 
His history was, after all, intended to contribute proof of the truth 
of the central doctrines in the hterature it used. He had to combine 
discriminating judgment with the ''will to believe." There is 
therefore more than rhetoric, though it is not lacking, in the apology 
with which he enters upon his narrative : 

" But at the outset I must crave for my work the indulgence of the wise, for 
I confess that it is beyond my power to produce a perfect and complete history, 
and since I am the first to enter upon the subject, I am attempting to trav- 
erse as it were a lonely and untrodden path. I pray that I may have God 
as my guide and the power of the Lord as my aid, since I am unable to find 
even the bare footsteps of those who have traveled the way before me, except 
in brief fragments, in which some in one way, others in another, have trans- 
mitted to us particular accounts of the times in which they lived. From afar 
they raise their voices like torches, and they cry out, as from some lofty and 
conspicuous watch-tower, admonishing us where to walk and how to direct the 
course of our work steadily and safely. Having gathered therefore from the 
matters mentioned here and there by them whatever we consider important 
for the present work, and having plucked like flowers from a meadow the ap- 
propriate passages from ancient writers, we shall endeavor to embody the 
whole in an historical narrative, content if we preserve the memory of the 
successions of the apostles of our Saviour ; if not indeed of all, yet of the most 
renowned of them in those churches which are the most noted, and which even 
to the present time are held in honor. 

" This work seems to me of especial importance because I know of no 
ecclesiastical writer who has devoted himself to this subject ; and I hope that 

nothing concerning them except the things in which we can vindicate the Divine 
judgment. Hence we shall not mention those who were shaken by the persecution, 
nor those who in everything pertaining to salvation were shipwrecked, and by their 
own wiU were sunk in the depths of the flood. But we shall introduce into this history 
in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to 
posterity." {The Church History of Eusebius (A. C. McGiffert's edition), Bk. VIII, 
Chap. II.) 



310 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

it will appear most useful to those who are fond of historical research. I have 
already given an epitome of these things in the Chronological Canons which 
I have composed, but notwithstanding that, I have undertaken in the present 
work to write as full an account of them as I am able. My work will begin, 
as I have said, with the dispensation of the Saviour Christ — which is loftier 
and greater than human conception, — and with a discussion of His divinity ; 
for it is necessary, inasmuch as we derive even our name from Christ, for one 
who proposes to write a history of the Church to begin with the very origin of 
Christ's dispensation, a dispensation more divine than many think." * 

In spite of the touch of rhetoric in such passages as this, the 
Ecclesiastical History does not live by grace of its style. Eusebius 
had no refined literary taste ; he wrote, as he thought, in rambling 
and desultory fashion. But he combined with vast erudition a 
"sterling sense," and a "true historical instinct" in choosing the 
selections from his store of facts and documents.^ Conscious of 
the value of the sources themselves, he weaves into his narrative 
large blocks of the originals, and in this way has preserved many 
a precious text which would otherwise be lost. The Ecclesiastical 
History is less a narrative than a collection of documents, for which 
every student of Christianity is devoutly thankful, and more thank- 
ful yet that the author was so keenly conscious of his responsibility. 
Wherever his references can be verified they prove correct, which 
gives a presumption of accuracy for those found in his work alone. 

Such instances of scholarly caution occur time and again in the 
Ecclesiastical History, in some cases revealing a discriminating use 
of sources in the effort to get to originals. This is especially the 
case where the incident narrated may seem in itself improbable, 
or where the skeptic is likely to challenge the evidence. For ex- 
ample, he narrates a story of Marcus Aurelius as follows : 

"It is reported that Marcus Aurelius Caesar, brother of Antoninus, being 
about to engage in battle with the Germans and Sarmatians, was in great 
trouble on account of his army suffering from thirst. But the soldiers of the 
so-called Melitene legion, through the faith which has given strength from that 
time to the present, when they were drawn up before the enemy, kneeled on the 
ground, as is our custom in prayer, and engaged in supplications to God. This 
was indeed a strange sight to the enemy, but it is reported that a stranger 

1 The Church History of Eusebius (A. C. McGiffert's edition), Bk. I, Chap. I. 
^ See the fine characterization by A. C. McGiffert, in the Prolegomena to his 
edition of The Church History of Eusebius, pp. 46 sqq. 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 311 

thing immediately followed. The lightning drove the enemy to flight and 
destruction, but a shower refreshed the army of those who had called on God, 
all of whom had been on the point of perishing with thirst. 

"This story is related by noiyChristian writers who have been pleased to 
treat the times referred to, and it has also been recorded by our own people. 
By those historians who were strangers to the faith, the marvel is mentioned, 
but it is not acknowledged as an answer to our prayers. But by our own 
people, as friends of the truth, the occurrence is related in a simple and artless 
manner. Among these is Apolinarius, who says that from that time the legion 
through whose prayers the wonder took place received from the Emperor a title 
appropriate to the event, being called in the language of the Romans the 
Thundering Legion. TertuUian is a trustworthy witness of these things. In 
the Apology for the Faith, which he addressed to the Roman Senate, and which 
we have already mentioned, he confirms the history with greater and stronger 
proofs. He writes that there are still extant letters of the most intelligent 
Emperor Marcus in which he testifies that his army, being on the point of 
perishing from thirst in Germany, was saved by the prayers of the Christians. 
And he says also that this emperor threatened death to those who brought 
accusations against us." ^ 

This scholarly accuracy was combined with a vast learning. 
Eusebius had enjoyed the freedom of the great library of Pamphilus 
at Antioch, in his earher days. He tells us that he gathered ma- 
terials as well in the library at Jerusalem founded by Bishop 
Alexander,^ and Constantine seems to have opened his archives to 
him.^ But he learned not less from the busy world in which he 
lived. He was no recluse ; he Uved at the centre of things, both 
poHtically and ecclesiastically. His genial nature blinded him to 
men's faults, and his judgments on contemporaries — particularly 
on Constantine — are of little value.'* But even at his worst he 
seldom recorded any marvellous event without the Herodotean 
caution of throwing the responsibility back upon the original nar- 
rative. There is no better example of this than the account in the 
Life of Constantine of the emperor's vision of the cross. It was an 
incident all too Ukely to find ready that credence in Christian circles 
which it found in subsequent ages. But, however much a courtly 
panegyrist Eusebius could be, in matters of fact he is on his guard. 

* The Church History of Eusebius (A. C. McGiffert's edition), Bk. V, Chap. V. 

* C/. Historia Ecdesiastica, Bk. VT, Chap. XX. 
3 Cf. ibid., Bk. V, Chap. XVIII. 

* The Life of Constantine is a panegyric rather than a biography; and it is 
unreliable even in questions of fact. 



312 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

His account runs soberly enough : "And while he was thus praying 
with fervent entreaty, a most marvellous sign appeared to him from 
heaven, the account of which might have been hard to believe had 
it been related by any other person. But since the victorious Em- 
peror himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this 
history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and 
confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit 
the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has estab- 
lished its truth ?" ^ 

For two centuries Christian worship had lain hidden behind 
the "Discipline of the Secret." The uninitiated knew Uttle of 
what was held or done by the adherents of this intolerant mystery, 
"after the doors were shut." Constantine brought the new regime, 
when persecution and secrecy ceased. Eusebius had hved through 
the dark days of Diocletian, and although he himself had escaped — 
a fact sometimes held up against him — his dearest friends, and 
above all his great teacher Pamphilus, had been martyred. Free 
now to speak, therefore, he turns back from the "peace of the 
church" to the years of persecution with a feeling for martyrs like 
that of Homer for heroes, of the Middle Ages for wonder-working 
saints.^ He depicts their sufferings, however, not simply as the 
material for heroic biography, but as forming the subject of a 
glorious page of history, that of the great "peaceful struggle" by 
which the Kingdom of the Messiah was to take its place among and 
above the powers of this world. The martyrs of Palestine are fight- 
ing the Punic wars for the kingdom of Christ : 

"Other writers of history record the victories of war and trophies won 
from enemies, the skill of generals, and the manly bravery of soldiers, defiled 
with blood and with innumerable slaughters for the sake of children and country 
and other possessions. But our narrative of the government of God will record 
in ineffaceable letters the most peaceful wars waged in behalf of the peace of 
the soul, and will tell of men doing brave deeds for truth rather than country, and 
for piety rather than dearest friends. It will hand down to imperishable re- 
membrance the discipline and the much-tried fortitude of the athletes of religion, 
the trophies won from demons, the victories over invisible enemies, and the 
crowns placed upon all their heads."* 

1 The Life of Constantine (E. C. Richardson's edition), Bk. I, Chap. XXVIII. 

2 Cf C. F. G. Heinrici, op. cit., p. 3. 

' The Church History of Eusebius (A. C. McGiffert's edition), Bk. V, Introduction, 
Sects. 3, 4. 



CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY 313 

It was reserved for a greater intellect — that of Augustine — to 
carry this conception of the Church as the realization of the tem- 
poral Kingdom of Christ to its final form. But the outlines of Au- 
gustine's City of God are already visible in the opening chapters 
of the Ecclesiastical History, as its foundations were placed by 
Eusebius' master, Origen. The Messiah is not a recent Christ, but 
comes to us from the beginning of the world, witnessed to by Moses 
and the prophets. And when "in recent times" Jesus came, the 
new nation which appeared was not new but old, the Nation of 
God's own Providence — Christian and universal. The paean of the 
victorious Church is sounded at the opening of its first history; 
"A nation confessedly not small and not dwelling in some corner 
of the earth, but the most numerous and pious of all nations, in- 
destructible and unconquerable, because it always receives assist- 
ance from God." ^ This is the historical prologue to the City of 
God. 

» The Church History of Eusebius (A. C. McGifiert's edition), Bk. I, Chap. IV. 



POSTSCRIPT ON MEDIAEVAL 
AND MODERN HISTORY 

CHAPTER XXVII 
THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY ^ 

Two great questions front all students of the social sciences : 
What happened? Why? History attempts to deal mainly with 
the first. It gathers the scattered traces of events and fills the ar- 
chives of civilization with their records. Its science sifts the evi- 
dence and prepares the story. Its art recreates the image of what 
has been, and "old, forgotten, far-off things" become once more the 
heritage of the present. Though no magic touch can wholly restore 
the dead past, history satisfies in considerable part the curiosity 
which asks, "What happened?" But "Why?" What forces have 
been at work to move the latent energies of nations, to set going 
the march of events? What makes our revolutions or our tory 
reactions? Why did Rome fall, Christianity triumph, feudaUsm 
arise, the Inquisition flourish, monarchy become absolute and of 
divine right, Spain decline, England emerge, democracy awaken 
and grow potent? Why did these things happen when or where 
they did? Was it the direct intervention of an overruling Provi- 
dence, for whose purposes the largest battalions were always on the 
move? Or are the ways past finding out? Do the events them- 
selves reveal a meaning ? 

These are not simply questions for philosophers. Children in- 
sist upon them most. He is a lucky story-teller whose Jack-the- 
Giant-Killer or Robin Hood is not cut through, time and again, 
by the unsatisfied curiosity as to why the beanstalk grew so high, 
why Jack wanted to climb, why Robin Hood lived under a green- 
wood tree, etc. Many a parental Herodotus has been wrecked on 
just such grounds. The problem for the philosopher or scientist 

*This chapter is the reprint of an article in The American Historical Review for 
July, 1913 (Vol. XVIII, No. 4). It was first given as a lecture in the University of 
Illinois in that year. It has been added as a sort of supplementary chapter in view of 
the impossibility of completing the survey of mediaeval and modern historians for some 
years to come. 

314 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 315 

is the same as that brought forward by the child. The drama of 
history unrolls before our eyes in more sober form; our Robin 
Hoods become Garibaldis, our Jack-the-Giant-Killer a Napoleon, 
but we still have to ask how fortune and genius so combined to 
place southern Italy in the hands of the one, Europe at the feet of 
the other. Not only is the problem the same, but we answer it in 
the same way. Here, at once, we have a clue to the nature of in- 
terpretation. For any one knows that you answer the child's 
"Why?" by telling another story. Each story is, in short, an ex- 
planation, and each explanation a story. The school-boy's excuse 
for being late is that he couldn't find his cap. He couldn't find his 
cap because he was playing in the barn. Each incident was a cause 
and each cause an incident in his biography. In like manner most 
of the reasons we assign for our acts merely state an event or a con- 
dition of affairs which is in itself a further page of history. At last, 
however, there comes a point where the philosopher and the child 
part company. History is more than events. It is the manifes- 
tation of Hfe, and behind each event is some effort of mind and will, 
while within each circumstance exists some power to stimulate or 
obstruct. Hence psychology and economics are called upon to 
explain the events themselves. The child is satisfied if you account 
for the career of Napoleon by a word ''genius," but that merely 
opens the problem to the psychologist. The child in us all attributes 
the overthrow to the hollow squares of Waterloo, but the economist 
reminds us of the Continental System and the Industrial Revolution 
which made Waterloo possible. 

The process of interpreting history, therefore, involves getting 
as much as possible out of history, psychology and economics — 
using economics in the widest possible sense as the affective material 
background of life. This does not get to final causes, to be sure. 
It leaves the universe still a riddle. Theologians and metaphy- 
sicians are the only ones who attempt to deal with final causes as 
with final ends. Certainly historians cannot follow them in such 
speculations. The infinite lies outside experience, and experience 
is the sphere of history. When we talk of the interpretation of 
history, therefore, we do not mean its setting in the universe, but a 
knowledge of its own inner relationships. We confine ourselves to 
humanity and the theatre of its activities. But within this realm 



3i6 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

of mystery man exists, acts and thinks — or thinks he does — 
which is all the same for historians ; and these thoughts and deeds 
remain mostly un-understood, even by the actors themselves. Here 
is mystery enough, mystery which is not in itself unknowable but 
merely unknown. The social sciences do not invade the field of 
religion ; they have nothing to do with the ultimate ; their prob- 
lems are those of the City of Man, not of the City of God. So the 
interpretation of history can leave theology aside, except where 
theology attempts to become historical. Then it must face the 
same criticism as all other histories. If the City of God is con- 
ceived of as a creation of the processes of civilization, it becomes as 
much a theme for scientific analysis as the Roman Empire or the 
Balkan Confederacy. If theology substitutes itself for science it 
must expect the same treatment as science. But our search for 
historic "causes" is merely a search for other things of the same 
kind — natural phenomena of some sort — which He in direct and 
apparently inevitable connection. We interpret history by know- 
ing more of it, bringing to bear our psychology and every other 
auxiliary to open up each intricate relationship between men, situ- 
ations and events. 

This is our first great principle. What do we mean by the 
"meaning" of anything but more knowledge of it? In physics or 
chemistry we enlarge our ideas of phenomena by observing how 
they work, what are their affinities, how they combine or react. 
But all these properties are merely different sides of the same thing, 
and our knowledge of it is the sum total of our analysis. Its mean- 
ing has changed, as our knowledge enlarges, from a lump of dirt to 
a compound of elements. No one asks what an element is, be- 
cause no one can tell — except in terms of other elements. The 
interpretation, therefore, of physical phenomena is a description 
of them in terms of their own properties. The same thing is true 
of history, only instead of description we have narrative. For his- 
tory differs from the natural sciences in this fundamental fact, 
that while they consider phenomena from the standpoint of Space, 
history deals with them from the standpoint of Time. Its data 
are in eternal change, moving in endless succession. Time has no 
static relationships, not so much as for a second. One moment 
merges into the next, and another has begun before the last is ended. 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 317 

The old Greeks already pointed out that one could never put his 
foot twice into the same waters of a running stream, and never has 
philosophy insisted more eloquently upon this fluid nature of Time 
than in the writings of Professor Bergson. But whatever Time 
may be in the last analysis it is clear that whereas physics states 
the meaning of the phenomena with which it deals in descriptions, 
history must phrase its interpretations in narrative — the narrative 
which runs with passing time. 

Hence history and its interpretation are essentially one, if we 
mean by history all that has happened, including mind and matter 
in so far as they relate to action. Any other kind of interpretation 
is unscientific. It eludes analysis because it does not itself analyze, 
and hence it eludes proof. So theological dogma, which may or 
may not be true, and speculation in metaphysics are alike outside 
our problem. Indeed, when we come down to it, there is little dif- 
ference between "What has happened?" and "Why?" The 
"Why?" only opens up another "What?" Take for example a 
problem in present history: "Why has the price of living gone 
up?" The same question might be asked another way: "What 
has happened to raise prices?" The change in the form of sentence 
does not solve anything, for who knows what has happened ? But 
it puts us upon a more definite track toward our solution. We 
test history by history. 

The earhest historical narrative is the myth. It is at the same 
time an explanation. It is no mere product of imagination, of the 
play of art with the wayward fancies of childlike men. Myths, 
real genuine myths — not Homeric epics composed for sophisti- 
cated, critical audiences — are statements of "facts" to the be- 
liever. They are social outputs, built up out of experience and 
fitted to new experiences. The long canoes are swept to sea by 
the northeast hurricane, and year by year in the winter nights at 
the camp-fires of those who go by long canoes the story is repeated, 
over and over again, until the sea is left behind or a new race brings 
triremes with machinery in the inside. So long as the old society 
exists under the old conditions the myth perpetuates itself; but 
it also gathers into it the reflex of the changing history. It there- 
fore embodies the behef of the tribe, and this gives it an authority 
beyond the reach of any primitive higher criticism. Appealed to as 



3i8 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

the "wisdom of our fathers," as the universally accepted and there- 
fore true — quod semper quod ab omnibus — it becomes a sort of creed 
for its people. More than a creed, it is as unquestioned as the 
world around and life itself. The eagle of Prometheus or of the 
Zufii myths is as much a part of the world to Greeks and Zuiiis as 
the eagle seen yonder on the desert-rim. The whole force of society 
is on the side of myth. The unbehever is ostracized or put to 
death. What would have happened to the man who should have 
dared to question the literal narrative of Genesis in the thirteenth 
century, has happened in some form in every society. The In- 
quisition, we are told, was merely a refinement of lynch law. In 
any case it would never have been effective without popular sup- 
port. The heretics of all ages suffer because the faith they chal- 
lenge is the treasured possession of their society, a heritage in which 
resides the mysterious efficacy of immemorial things. 

Now it is a strange fact that most of our beliefs begin in prior 
belief. It does not sound logical, but it remains true that we get 
to believing a thing from believing it. Belief is the basic element in 
thought. It starts with consciousness itself. Once started, there 
develops a tendency — "a will" — to keep on. Indeed it is almost 
the strongest tendency in the social mind. Only long scientific 
training can keep an individual alert with doubt, or, in other words, 
keep him from merging his own beliefs in those of his fellows. This 
is the reason that myth has so long played so momentous a role in 
the history of the human intelhgence — by far the largest of any 
one element in our whole history. Science was born but yesterday. 
Myths are millenniums old. And they are as young today as in 
the glacial period. Heroes and victims share the stage of the drama 
of history with those uncanny Powers that mock at effort or exalt 
the weak, and trick with sudden turns the stately progress of so- 
ciety. Wherever the marvellous event is explained by causes more 
marvellous still, where the belief is heightened by basing it upon 
deeper mysteries, we are following the world-old method of ex- 
plaining by the inexplicable. 

Myths are unsatisfactory as explanations for various reasons, 
but the main one is that human events are subordinated to the super- 
natural in which they are set. This means that normal events of 
daily life are generally passed unnoticed, and attention is con- 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 319 

centrated upon the unusual and abnormal. It is in these that the 
divine or diabolic intervenes. They are preeminently — as we 
still say of railway accidents — acts of God. So the myth neither 
tells a full story, with all the human data involved, nor directs to 
any natural sequence of events. Sickness and consequent catas- 
trophe are not attributed to malarial mosquitoes — such as filled 
the temples of ^sculapius with suppUants and depleted Greece 
of citizens. All misfortune is due to broken taboos. When Roman 
armies are defeated the question is, ''Who has sinned and how?" 
When death comes to the Austrahan bushman, there is always 
black magic to account for it. And pontiffs and medicine men 
elaborate the mythology which explains and justifies the taboos. 

That is not to say that myths are the creations of priests. The 
creation is the work of the society itself. The priest merely elabo- 
rates. The initial behef resides in the nerves of primitive men, the 
fear of the uncanny, the vague apprehension which still chills us 
in the presence of calamity. Social suggestion is responsible for 
much of it — we tremble when we see the rigid fear on the faces of 
those beside us. When some one whispers in the dark, "Isn't it 
awful?" **It" suddenly thrills into being, like a ghost. Voltaire 
was wrong to attribute the origin of these beliefs of superstition to 
priestcraft. The priest merely took hold of the universal beliefs 
of his people and gave them form and consistency, as the minstrel 
wove them into poetry. The scruple about entering the dark 
wooded slopes beyond the village grain-fields is enough to people 
it, for most of us, with all uncanny things. If you are the kind of 
person to have scruples about entering a wood by night, you are 
the kind to appreciate the possibilities of lurking danger in its 
shadows and moving presences in its thickets. So on a night, when 
the moon is high and the wind is still, you may hear the hounds and 
the wolf-packs of the wild hunters — of Diana and Mars. It needs 
no priestly college to convince us of that. The wood and the 
wolves and our own nerves are enough. But the priestly college 
develops the things of night into the stuff for history ; and centuries 
after the howling wolves have disappeared from the marshes 
around Rome the city cherishes, to the close of its history, the myth 
of its founding. 

Men first tell stories. Then they think about them. So from 



320 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

mythology, the ancients proceeded to philosophy. Now philosophy 
is a wide word. For some of us it means keen criticism of funda- 
mental things. For others it is a befuddled consideration of un- 
reahties. But whatever it may be now, philosophy came into the 
antique world as science, critical analysis, and history was but 
another name for it. The "inquiry" of those Ionian logographoi 
who began to question Homer, in the sixth century before Christ, 
was a challenge and interpretation of myth. So, all through its 
history, history has demanded of its students denial rather than 
acceptance, skepticism rather than beHef, in order that the story of 
men and empires be more than a myth. But the tendency to believe 
and accept is so strongly impressed upon us from immemorial social 
pressures that few have risen to the height of independent judgment 
which was the Greek ideal. Criticism, in the full sense of the word, 
is an interpretation. To reject a story means that one constructs 
another in its place. It estabhshes that certain things did not 
happen because certain other ones did. So the Greeks corrected 
myths, and in doing this made history more rational. Man came 
into the story more and the gods receded. 

One may distinguish two phases of philosophic interpretation 
of history, that in which the philosophy is in reality a theology and 
that in which it is natural science. In the first phase we are still 
close to myth. Myth places the cause of events in Mystery of 
some sort — deities, demons, the Fates or Fortune. Early philoso- 
phy proceeds upon these assumptions, which also penetrate most 
antique histories. Even Polybius, hard-headed, much-experienced 
man of the world, cannot quite attribute to natural causes the rise 
of Rome. Fortune, that wayward goddess of Caesar, had some- 
thing to do with it — how much it would be hard to say. Livy 
had this myth-philosophy to the full; every disaster had its por- 
tent, every triumph its omen. This was the practical philosophy 
of all but the few calm thinkers whose skepticism passed into the 
second phase, which reached all the way from an open question 
whether or not the gods interfered in human affairs to the positive 
denial of their influence. The great sourcebook for such inter- 
pretations of history is Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, where 
one may find in the guise of a theological discussion a resume of 
the various pagan philosophies of history. For the philosophies 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 321 

of history were more frankly philosophy than history ; the question 
at issue was the intruding mystery rather than the circumstances 
of the intrusion, and one denied or afl&rmed mainly on a priori 
grounds. The denial was not historical criticism and the phi- 
losophy of doubt hardly more genuine historical interpretation than 
the philosophy of beUef. Its conclusions more nearly coincide 
with the demands of scientific research ; that is all. But mythology 
was not Ughtly to be got rid of, even among philosophers, and as 
for the populace, it merely exchanged one myth for another, until 
finally it could take refuge in theology. The bold infidelity of a 
Lucretius was too modern for the age which was to give birth to 
Christianity, and the Voltaires of antiquity were submerged in a 
rising sea of faith. 

Moreover there were two reasons why antique philosophy could 
not accompUsh much. It lacked the instruments by which to pene- 
trate into the two centres of its problem : psychology, to analyze the 
mind, and experimental laboratories, to analyze the setting of life 
or Hfe itself. It had some knowledge of psychology, to be sure, 
and some experimental science, but relatively little; and it never 
realized the necessity for developing them. It sharpened the reason 
to an almost uncanny degree, and played, like a grown athlete, 
with ideas. But it followed the ideas into their ideal world and 
left this world unaccounted for. Above all, it knew practically 
nothing of economic and material elements in history. Even a 
Thucydides has no glimpse of the intimate connection between 
the forces of economics and of politics. History for him is made 
by men, not by grain-fields and metals. It was not until the nine- 
teenth century — just the other day — that economic factors in 
historical causation were emphasized as playing a role comparable 
to that of man himself. Thucydides did not realize how commer- 
cial and industrial competition could rouse the rivals of Athens to 
seek her overthrow. Polybius felt that Fortune was a weak excuse 
to offer for Rome's miraculous rise and fell back upon the peculiar 
excellence of her constitution. Both were rationalists of a high 
order, but they never extended their history — and therefore their 
interpretation — beyond politics. The gods tend to disappear, 
and mankind to take their place. But it is an incomplete mankind, 
rational beings moved by ideas and principles ; not economic ani- 



322 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

mals moved by blind wants and fettered by the basest limitations. 
In short, a political man is the farthest analysis one gets. But 
even Aristotle never knew how many things there were in politics 
besides politics. The extent of the interplay of material forces 
upon psychological lay outside his ken. 

Upon the whole, then, there is almost nothing to learn from 
antique interpretations of history. They interest us because of 
their antiquity and their drift from the supernatural to the natural. 
But they did not achieve a method which would open up the natural 
and let us see its working. They are of no service to us in our own 
interpretations. 

Christianity dropped all this rationalist tone of the Greeks, and 
turned the keen edge of Greek philosophy to hew a structure so 
vast in design, so simple in outline, that the whole world could under- 
stand. History was but the reahzation of religion — not of various 
religions, but of one ; the working out of one divine plan. It was 
a vast, supernatural process, more God's than man's. It was no 
longer a play of rival forces, the gods of Rome against those of Veii 
or the Baalim against Jahveh. But from all eternity the drama 
had been determined by the Wisdom that was infinite, and it was 
being wrought out by an almighty arm. Baal and Jupiter are 
creatures and puppets, like mere men. History has only one in- 
terpretation. Rome — city and empire — is the spoil of the bar- 
barian, the antique world is going to pieces, all its long heritage 
of culture, its millenniums of progress, its arts and sciences are 
perishing in the vast, barbaric anarchy : why ? There is one an- 
swer, suflflcient, final — God wills it. No uncertain guesses as to 
the virtue of peoples, weights of battalions, resources of countries, 
pressures of populations, wasteful administrations, black deaths, 
impoverished provinces. There is sin to be punished. The pagan 
temples of the ancient world, with their glories of art shining on 
every acropolis, are blasphemy and invite destruction. Philoso- 
phers and poets whose inspiration had once seemed divine now 
seem diabolic. Those who catch the vision of the new faith, shake 
off the Old World as one shakes off a dream. Talk of revolutions ! 
No doctrines of the rights of man have caught the imagination with 
such terrific force as these doctrines of the rights of God, which 
from Paul to Augustine were clothed with all the convincing logic 




THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 323 

of Hellenic genius and Roman realism. It is hard for us Christians 
to realize the amount of religion which Christianity injected into 
the world; not merely among the credulous populace, on the re- 
hgious qui vive, but among thinking men. It saturated philosophy 
with dogma and turned speculation from nature to the super- 
natural. 

The earliest Christians cherished the belief that the world was 
soon to end and lived under the shadow of the day of doom. As 
time went on, this millennial hope seemed to grow fainter ; but in 
reality it merely took a more rigid form. It became the structural 
heart of the new theology. The pageant of history, which had 
seemed so gloriously wonderful, so inspiring to a Polybius back in 
the old heroic days, was now a worn and sorry thing. It had no 
glory nor even any meaning except in the hght of the new dispen- 
sation. On the other hand the new patria, the Civitas Dei, tran- 
scending all earthly splendor, was absorbing, not merely the present 
and the future, but the past as well. For all the tragic hnes of war 
and suffering were now converging. All the aimless struggUng was 
now to show its hidden purpose. In Christianity, the story of 
nations, of poUtics, economics, art, war, law — in short of civil- 
ization — culminated, and ceased ! 

Such was the thought which underlay all Christian apologetic 
theology from the first. But it received its classic statement in 
the City of God by Augustine, written when the city of Rome had 
fallen, and — if it were not for the heretics and the barbarians — 
the claims of theology seemed almost reahzable. For a thousand 
years and more it was the unquestioned interpretation of the mean- 
ing of history, easily adaptable to any circumstance because it 
covered all. It still is found wherever pure theology satisfies his- 
torical curiosity. That includes — or has included — not merely 
theologians but most other people, for however slight has been 
the interest in theology it has been greater than the interest in 
scientific history, at least until recent times. Religion has supplied 
the framework of our thought, and the picture of our evolution. 
The most influential historians of Europe have been the parish 
priests. In every hamlet, however remote, for the lowly as for 
those of high degree, they have repeated the story week after week, 
century after century. Greek writers and thinkers, mediaeval 



324 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

minstrels and modern journalists can hardly match their influence 
upon the mind of the mass of men. Their tale itself was an un- 
rivalled epic, dark with the supreme central tragedy upon which 
Christendom itself rested, rising to the keenest voicing of the hopes 
of life. Its very element was miracle. No fairy story could rival 
its devious turns, while at the same time the theme swept over the 
whole path of history — so far as they knew or cared. It was the 
story of a chosen people, of divine governance from creation to the 
founding of their own church, guarded in a sacred book and inter- 
preted from a sacred tongue. 

Slowly, however, the setting of the Church had changed. The 
vision of the day of judgment died away almost altogether. Men 
who dared to dream apocalypses — like Joachim of Flora — or 
their followers were judged heretics by a church which had planted 
itself in saculo and surrounded itself with all the pomp and circum- 
stance of temporal power. There was still a lingering echo of the 
older faith, heard most often in the solemn service for the dead. 
So long as the universe was ptolemaic — the world of Dante and of 
Milton — the heavy chord of dies ira would cut in upon the growing 
interest in the world itself. But once the crystalline sphere was 
shattered by Copernicus and GaUleo, and the infinite spaces were 
strewn with stars like our own, the old idea of a world to "shrivel 
like a parched scroll" had to be revised and readjusted, and with 
it the simple conception of the divine purpose, centred upon the 
centre of things, and working by direct intervention through con- 
stant miracle. There was no sudden revolution, the old ideas were 
too firmly fixed for that. Moreover, science began to challenge 
the theological history of the universe before it challenged the 
theological history of man himself. But when geology began to 
bring in evidence of the age of our residence, and physics achieved 
the incredible feat of weighing the forces and determining the con- 
ditions which held the worlds together, then the details of the scheme 
of Augustine had to be recast as well. From Augustine to Bossuet 
one may trace an almost unbroken line of theological interpretations. 
But some, at least, of the generation which listened to Bossuet were 
also to watch Bolingbroke and Voltaire whetting the weapons of 
rationahst attack. 

Now what is the weakness of the theological interpretation of 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 325 

history? It is of the same character as that we have seen in the 
myth. The interpretation is outside of history altogether. Grant 
aU that theology claims, that Rome fell and England arose, that 
America was discovered, or was so long undiscovered, because 
"God wills it." That does not enlarge our knowledge of the pro- 
cess. It satisfies only those who beUeve in absolutely unquaUfied 
Calvinism — and they are becoming few and far between. If man 
is a free agent, even to a limited degree, he can find the meaning 
of his history in the history itself — the only meaning which is of 
any value as a guide to conduct or as throwing light upon his actions. 
Intelligent inquiry has free scope within a universe of ever-widening 
boundaries, where nature, and not supernature, presents its sober 
phenomena for patient study. 

This patient study, however, had not yet been done when the 
eighteenth-century deists attacked the theological scheme, and 
their philosophy shares to some extent the weakness of the antique, 
in its ignorance of data. Natural law took the place of an inter- 
vening Providence ; history was a process worked out by the forces 
of nature moving uniformly, restless but continuous, unchecked, 
inevitable. The process comprised all mankind ; no chosen people, 
implying injustice to those not chosen ; no miracles disturbing the 
regularity of nature. This was an advance toward future under- 
standing because it concentrated attention upon nature and the 
method of evolution, yet in itself it cast but Uttle Hght upon the 
problem. For it did not explain details. One sees its failure most 
where it risked hypotheses with most assurance, in its treatment of 
rehgion. It would not do for philosophers to admit that religion — 
at least of the old, historic type — was itself one of the laws of 
nature, implanted in humanity from the beginning. Consequently 
it was for them a creation of priestcraft. No dismissal of its claims 
could be more emphatic. Yet the old theologies have since proved 
that they have at least as many natural rights in society as the 
criticism of them, and now, with our new knowledge of primitive 
life, dominated by religion as we see it to be, we cast aside the ration- 
alist conception as a distortion of history almost as misleading as 
those of the mythology it tried to dispose of. 

But the work of Voltaire and his school, in disrupting the old 
authority of Church and Bible — bitterly denounced and blackly 



326 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

maligned as it has been — is now recognized by all thinking minds, 
at least by all leaders of thought, to have been an essential service 
in the emancipation of the human intellect. The old sense of 
authority could never afterwards, as before, block the free path of 
inquiry; and the Era of EnUghtenment, as it was fondly termed, 
did enlighten the path which history was to take if it was to know 
itself. The anti-clerical bias of Hume and Gibbon is perhaps all 
the casual reader perceives in them. But where among all previous 
historians does one find the attitude so genuinely historical ? More- 
over, in Hume we have the foundations of psychology, and a criti- 
cism of causality which was of the first importance. It would be 
tempting to linger over these pioneers of the scientific spirit, who 
saw but could not realize the possibihties of naturalism. Their 
own achievement, however, was so faulty in just this matter of 
interpretation, that it was not difficult for the reaction of the early 
nineteenth century to poke holes in their theories, and so discredit — 
for the time being — their entire outlook. 

Before Voltaire had learned in England the main hnes of his 
philosophy, a German-Scottish boy had been born in Konigsberg, 
in Prussia, who was destined to exercise as high if not as extended a 
sovereignty over the intellect of the nineteenth century. Immanuel 
Kant, however, was of a different type. He fought no ringing 
fights with the old order. He simply created a new realm in meta- 
physics, where one could take refuge and have the world as his own. 
The idea dominates. Space and time, the a priori forms of all 
phenomena, lie within us. Mathematics is vindicated because the 
mind can really master relationships, and the reason emerges from 
its critique to grapple with the final problem of metaphysics. This 
at first sight has little to do with interpreting history, but it proved 
to have a great deal to do with it. The dominance of ideas became 
a fundamental doctrine among those who speculated concerning 
causation in history, and metaphysics all but replaced theology as 
an interpreter. 

One sees this already in the work of the historian's historian of 
the nineteenth century, Leopold von Ranke. To him each age and 
country is explicable only if one approaches it from the standpoint 
of its own Zeitgeist. But the spirit of a time is more than the ten>- 
poral environment in which events are set. It is a determining 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 327 

factor, clothed with the creative potency of mind. Ranke did not 
develop this philosophic background of history, he accepted it and 
worked from rather than towards it. His Zeitgeist was a thing for 
historians to portray, not to speculate about. History should con- 
cern itself with the preservation of phenomena as they had actually 
existed in their own time and place. It should recover the lost data 
of the past, not as detached specimens such as the antiquary places 
in his museum, but transplanted like living organisms for the preser- 
vation of the life as well as of the organs. Now, where else should 
one look for the vital forces of history than in the mind of the actors ? 
So if the historic imagination can restore events, not simply as they 
seem to us but as they seemed to those who watched them taking 
place, we shall understand them in so far as history can contribute 
to their understanding. In any case this is the field of the his- 
torian. If he injects his own theories into the operation he merely 
falsifies what he has already got. Let the past stand forth once 
more, interpreted by itself, and we have the truth — incomplete, 
to be sure, but as perfect as we shall ever be able to attain. For, 
note the point, in that past, the dominating thing was the Zeitgeist 
itself — a thing at once to be worked out and working out, a pro- 
gramme and a creative force. Why, therefore, should one turn 
aside to other devices to explain history, since it explained itself if 
once presented in its own light ? 

Ranke developed no further the implications of his theory than 
to ensure a reproduction of a living past, as perfect as with the 
sources at his disposal and the political instincts of his time it was 
possible to secure. But this high combination of science and art 
had its counterpart in the philosophy of Hegel. At first sight 
nothing could be more absurd than the comparison of these two 
men, the one concrete, definite, searching for minute details, main- 
taining his own objectivity by insisting upon the subjectivity of 
the materials he handles, the other theoretic, unhistorical, creating 
worlds from his inner consciousness, presenting as a scheme of 
historical interpretation a programme of ideals, unattained and, 
for all we know, unattainable. It would be difficult to imagine a 
philosophy of history more unhistorical than this of Hegel. Yet 
he but emphasized the Idea which Ranke imphcitly accepted. 

Hegel was a sort of philosophic Augustine, tracing through his- 



328 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

tory the development of the reahn of the spirit. The City of God 
is still the central theme, but the crude expectations of a miraculous 
advent are replaced by the conception of a slow realization of its 
spiritual power, rising through successive stages of civilization. 
So he traces, in broad philosophic outlines, the history of this 
revelation of the Spirit, from its dawn in the Orient, through its 
developing childhood in Asia, its Egyptian period of awakening, 
its liberation in Greece, its maturity in the Roman balance of the 
individual and the State, until finally Christianity, especially in 
the German world, carries the spirit Ufe to its highest expression. 
In this process the Absolute reveals itself — that Absolute which 
had mocked the deists with its isolation and unconcern. And it 
reveals itself in the Idea which Kantian critique had placed in the 
forefront of reaUty and endowed with the creative force of an elan 
vital. So theology, skepticism and metaphysics combined to ex- 
plain the world and its history — as the working out of an ideal 
scheme. 

As a series of successive ideals the Hegelian scheme may offer 
some suggestions to those who wish to characterize the complex 
phenomena of an age or an empire in a single phrase. But it is no 
statement of any actual process. The ideals which it presents re- 
main ideals, not reaUties. History written to fit the Hegehan meta- 
physics would be almost as vigorous a distortion as that which 
Orosius wrote to fit Augustinian theology. The history of prac- 
tical Christianity, for instance, is a vastly different thing from the 
history of its ideals. It is an open question whether the ideal 
could ever be deduced from the practice, and not less questionable 
whether we are any nearer realization than at the start. There 
has been Uttle evidence in outward signs of any such determinant 
change in the nature of politics or in the stern enforcement of eco- 
nomic laws during the history of western Europe. We find our- 
selves repeating in many ways experiences of Rome and Greece — 
pagan experiences. Society is only partly reUgious and only 
slightly self-conscious. How, then, can it be merely the mani- 
festation of a reUgious ideal? Surely other forces than ideals or 
ideas must be at work. The weakness of Hegel's interpretation 
of history is the history. He interprets it without knowing what 
it is. His interest was in the other side of his scheme, the Absolute 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 329 

which was revealing itself therein. The scheme, indeed, was a 
sort of afterthought. But before historians directed any sufl&cient 
criticism against his unhistoricity, skepticism in philosophy had 
already attacked his Absolute. It was the materialistic Feuer- 
bach, with his thoroughgoing avowal that man is the creature of 
his appetite and not of his mind {Der Mench ist was er isst), who 
furnished the transition to a new and absolutely radical line of his- 
torical interpretation — the materiaUstic and the economic. 

Materialism has a bad name. It has partly earned it, partly had 
it thrust upon it. But whatever one may think of its cruder dogmatic 
aspects, the fact remains that interpretation of history owes at 
least as much to it as to all the speculations which had preceded it. 
For it supplied one half the data — the material half ! Neither 
theology nor metaphysics had really ever got down to earth. They 
had proceeded upon the theory that the determination of history 
is from above and from within mankind, and had been so absorbed 
with working out their scheme from these premises that the possibil- 
ity of determination from around did not occur to them, until the 
physical and biological sciences and the new problems of economics 
pressed it upon their attention. To the old philosophies, this world 
was at best a theatre for divine or psychic forces ; it contributed 
no part of the drama but the setting. Now came the claim that the 
environment itself entered into the play and that it even determined 
the character of the production. It was a claim based upon a study 
of the details from a new standpoint, that of the commonplace, of 
business, and of the affairs of daily life. The farmer's work de- 
pends upon his soil, the miner's upon the pumps which open up the 
lower levels. Cities grow where the forces of production concen- 
trate, by harbors or coal-fields. A study of plains, river valleys or 
mountain ranges tends to show that societies match their environ- 
ment ; therefore the environment moulds them to itself. So the 
nature of the struggle for existence, out of which emerges inteUi- 
gence, is determined by the material conditions under which it is 
waged. 

This is innocent enough. One might have expected that philos- 
ophers would have welcomed the emphasis which the new thinkers 
placed upon the missing half of their speculations. For there was 
no getting around the fact that the influences of environment upon 



330 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

society had been largely or altogether ignored before the scien- 
tific era forced the world upon our view. But no. The dogmatic 
habits had got too firmly fixed. If one granted that the material 
environment might determine the character of the drama of history, 
why should it not determine whether there should be any drama 
at all or not? There were extremists on both sides, and it was 
battle royal — Realism and Nominahsm over again. One was to 
be either a Hegelian, booted and spurred, sworn, cavalier-like, to the 
defence of the divine right of the Idea, or a regicide materialist with 
a Calvinistic creed of irreUgion ! The total result was that their 
mutual opinion of each other brought both into ill repute. Philos- 
ophies of history became at least as discredited as the materialism 
they attacked. 

Now the materialistic interpretation of history does not neces- 
sarily imply that there is nothing but materialism in the process, any 
more than theology implies that there is nothing but spirit. It wUl be 
news to some that such was the point of view of the most famous ad- 
vocate of the materialistic interpretation of history, H. T. Buckle. 
His History of Civilization in England (1857-1861) was the first at- 
tempt to work out the influences of the material world upon the for- 
mation of societies. Every one has heard of how he developed, 
through a wealth of illustration, the supreme importance of food, soil 
and the general aspect of nature. But few apparently have actually 
read what he says, or they would find that he assigns to these three 
factors an ever-lessening function as civilization advances, that he 
postulates mind as much as matter, and, with almost Hegelian 
vision, indicates its ultimate control. He distinctly states that 
"the advance of European civilization is characterized by a di- 
minishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of 
mental laws," and that "the measure of civilization is the triumph 
of the mind over external agents." If Buckle had presented his 
scheme politely, right side up, as it were, it could hardly have had 
a sermon preached at it ! But he prefaced it with his opinion of 
theologians and historians — and few, apparently, have ever got 
beyond the preface. It was not encouraging reading for historians 
— a class of men who, in his opinion, are so marked out by "in- 
dolence of thought" or "natural incapacity" that they are fit for 
nothing better than writing monastic annals. There was, of course, 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 331 

a storm of aggrieved protest. But now that the controversy has 
cleared away, we can see that, in spite of his too confident formu- 
lation of his laws, the work of Buckle remains as that of a worthy 
pioneer in a great, unworked field of science. 

Ten years before Buckle published his History of Civilization, 
Karl Marx had already formulated the ''economic theory of his- 
tory." Accepting with reservations Feuerbach's materiahst attack 
upon Hegel, Marx was led to the conclusion that the motive causes 
of history are to be found in the conditions of material existence. 
Already in 1845 he wrote, of the young-Hegelians, that to separate 
history from natural science and industry was like separating the 
soul from the body, and "finding the birthplace of history, not in 
the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud 
formation of heaven." ^ In his Miser e de la philosophie (1847) he 
lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend 
upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas, 
categories, which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the 
relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. 
From these grounds, Marx went on to socialism, which bases its 
militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the 
truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. 
In the famous manifesto of the Communist party (1848) the theory 
was applied to show how the Commercial and Industrial Revo- 
lutions, with the attendant growth of capital, had replaced feudal 
by modern conditions. This, like all history written to fit a theory, 
is inadequate history, although much nearer reality than Hegel ever 
got, because it dealt more with actualities. But we are not con- 
cerned here with Marx's own history-writing any more than with 
his sociaUsm. What we want to get at is the standpoint for in- 
terpretation. Marx himself, in the preface to the first edition' of 
Capital, says that his standpoint is one "from which the evolution 
of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural 
history." This sounds like the merest commonplace. Human 
history is thrown in line with that of the rest of nature. The scope 
is widened to include every factor, and the greatest one is that 
which deals with the maintenance of life and the attainment of 
comfort. So far so good. But Marx had not been a pupil of Hegel 

* K. Marx, Die heilige Familie (1845), p. 238. 



332 INTRODUCTION TO THE fflSTORY OF HISTORY 

for nothing. He, too, went on to absolutes, simply turning Hegel's 
upside down. With him " the ideal is nothing else than the material 
world reflected by the human mind." ^ The world is the thing, 
not the idea. So he goes on to make man, the modifier of nature, 
with growing control over it, but a function of it — a tool of the 
tool, just when he has mastered it by new inventions. 

But strange as it may seem, Marx's scheme, like Buckle's, cul- 
minates in mind, not in matter. The first part is economic purely. 
The industrial proletarians — "the workers," as sociaUsm fondly 
terms them — are, like capitahsm, the product of economic forces. 
The factory not only binds the shackles upon the wage-slaves of to- 
day, it even fills the swarming ergastula of city slums by the stimu- 
lation of child labor. So the process continues until the proletariat, 
as a last result of its economic situation, acquires a common con- 
sciousness. Then what happens? The future is not to be as the 
past. Consciousness means intelligence, and as soon as the prole- 
tariat understands, it can burst shackles, master economics, and so 
control, instead of bUndly obeying, the movement of its creative 
energy. Whether sociaUsm would achieve the object of its faith 
and hope is not for us to consider, but the point remains, that in 
the ultimate analysis, even the economic interpretation of history 
ends uneconomically. It ends in directing intelligence, in ideals of 
justice, of social and moral order. 

Where are we? We have passed in review the mythological, 
theological, philosophical, materialistic and economic interpre- 
tations of history, and have found that none of these, stated in 
its extremest form, meets the situation. Pure theology or 
metaphysics omits or distorts the history it is supposed to explain ; 
history is not its proper business. Materialism and economics, 
while more promising because more earthly, cannot be pressed 
beyond a certain point. Life itself escapes their analysis. The 
conclusion is this : that we have two main elements in our problem 
which must be brought together — the psychic on the one hand, 
the material on the other. Not until psychology and the natural 
and economic sciences shall have been turned upon the problem, 
working in cooperation as allies, not as rivals, will history be able 
to give an inteUigent account of itself. They will need more data 
^ Quoted from the preface to the second edition of Capital. 



THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 333 

than we have at present. The only economics which can promise 
scientific results is that based upon the statistical method, for, in 
spite of Bergson, brilUant guesses can hardly satisfy unless they 
are verified. The natural sciences are only beginning to show the 
Ultimate relation of life to its environment, and psychology has 
hardly begun the study of the group. But one sees already a grow- 
ing appreciation of common interests, a desire on the part of econ- 
omists to know the nature of the mechanism of the universe whose 
working they attempt to describe; an inquiry from the biologist 
as to the validity of un-eugenic social reform. 

Now the interpretation of history lies here, with these cooper- 
ative workers upon the mystery of hfe and of its environment, and 
their interplay. That does not mean that history is to be explained 
from the outside. More economics means more history — if it is 
good economics. Marx, for instance, attempted to state both 
facts and processes of industrial history, Malthus of population, 
Ricardo of wages, etc. Both facts and processes are the stuff of 
history. The statement of a process may be glorified into a "law," 
but a "law" merely means a general fact of history. It holds good 
under certain conditions, which are either historical or purely 
imaginary, and it is only in the latter case that it lies outside the 
field of history. It is the same with psychology as with economics. 
It suppUes an analysis of action, and action is history. Expla- 
nation is more knowledge of the same thing. All inductive study 
of society is historical. 

The interpretations of history are historical in another sense. 
Looking back over the way we have come, from Greek philosophers 
to modern economists and psychologists, one can see in every case 
that the interpretation was but the reflex of the local environment, 
the expression of the dominant interest of the time. History be- 
came critical in that meeting place of East and West, the Ionian 
coast of Asia Minor, where divergent civilizations were opened up 
for contrast with each new arrival from the south and west and 
where travellers destroyed creduhty. In the same way, as we have 
traced it, the isolated landed society of the Middle Ages, with its 
absence of business and its simple relationships, could rest compla- 
cent with an Augustinian world-view. Nothing else was demanding 
explanation. When business produced a Florence and Florence a 



334 INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

Machiavelli, we have a gleam of newer things, just as Voltaire and 
Hume mirror the influences of Galileo, and the voyages to China. 
With the nineteenth century the situation becomes more compli- 
cated, and yet one can see the interpretation of history merely pro- 
jecting into the past — or drawing out of it — the meaning of each 
present major interest. Kant and Hegel fit into the era of 
ideologues and nationalist romanticists ; and their implications are 
developed under the reaction following the French Revolution- 
Buckle draws his inspiration from the trend of science which pro- 
duced — in the same year — the Origin of Species. Marx is the 
interpreter of the Industrial Revolution. 

But this does not mean that interpretations of history are 
nothing more than the injection into it of successive prejudices. 
It means progressive clarification. Each new theory that forces 
itself upon the attention of historians brings up new data for their 
consideration and so widens the field of investigation. The greater 
knowledge of our world today reveals the smallness of our knowl- 
edge of the past, and from every side scholars are hastening to 
make the content of history more worthy of comparison with the 
content of science. From this point of view, therefore, inter- 
pretation, instead of assuming the position of a final judge of con- 
duct or an absolute law, becomes only a suggestive stimulus for 
further research. 

We have, therefore, an historical interpretation of interpre- 
tations themselves. It accepts two main factors, material and 
psychical, not concerning itself about the ultimate reality of either. 
It is not its business to consider ultimate reahties, though it may 
be grateful for any light upon the subject. Less ambitious than 
theological, philosophical or even economic theories, it views it- 
self as part of the very process which it attempts to understand. 
If it has no ecstatic ghmpses of finahty, it shares at least to the full 
the exhilaration of the scientific quest. It risks no premature fate 
in the delusive security of an inner consciousness. When you ask 
it "Why?" it answers "What?" 



INDEX 



Abydos, 54, n. 

Achxans, 193. 

Acts, Book of, 307. 

Acusilaus, 124 sq. 

Mneid, 219 sqq. 

iEschylus, 147, 166. 

if^tolians, 193. 

Against Apion, 120, 387 o. 

Agricola, Cn. Julius, 358. 

Album, 227. 

Alexander, 188, 206. 

Alexander Polyhistor, 76 n. 

Alexandria, 32 sq., 45 sq., 49, 64, ill, 117, 131, 

205, 207 n., 209, 291. 
Allegory, 53, n., 54 n., 115, 117 sq., 388, 290 

sqq.. 298. 
Alphabet, 28, 32 sq., 36, 124, 134, 137, 304. 
Ammianus Marcellinus, 31 1 sq., 375 sq. 
Amos, Book of, 91. 
Anabasis, 180. 
Andronicus Livius, 318. 
Androtion, 188 n. 
Animism, 42. 
Annates Maximi, 313, 336 n., 337 sq., 330, 

234- 

Annals, 39, 102, 106, 217, 320, 336, 339; 
Assyrian, 72, loi ; Egyptian, 51 sq., 55 sq., 
58 sqq. ; Medixval, 9, 30 n., 143 ; Monastic, 
238 ; Origin of, 38 ; Priestly, 45 ; Profane, 
30S ; Rome, 31, 39, 187 n., 213, 226 sqq., 238, 
252 sq., 259, 264, 266, 276; Royal, 45, 81, 
loi ; Sacred, 305. 

Anthropology, 11, 15, n., 19, 3i n., 36, n., 40, 
86, 89 n., no n., 236. 

Antiochus, 125. 

Antipater, L. Coelius, 214, 234 sq. 

Antiochus Epiphanes, no, I30. 

Antonines, 208. 

Antonius, Marcus, 212 sqq. 

Apion, 120, n., 123. 

Apocalypse, Book of, 284 n. 

Apocalypses, 105, 114, 116. 

Apocrypha, 112 n. 

Apollodorus, 50 n., 207 n., 238. 

Appian, 209, 275. 

Aquila, 112 n., 291. 

Aratus, 193. 

Archaeology, 9, 12 sqq., 26, n., 39 n., 51 sq., 66, 
71, 113, 12S sq., 157 sq., 170. 

Aristotle, 7, 33, 128, 136, i88 n., 303, 214, 
322. 



Arrian, 209, 275. 

Asellio, P. Sempronius, 229 n., 334. 

Ashur-bani-pal, 31, 69, 74. 

Ashur-nasir-pal III, 72 sq. 

Assyria, 26 n., 44 sqq., 66, 69, 72 sqq., 80, 

100 sq., 121 n., 126, 129, 134, 230, 285. 
Astronomy, 40 sqq. 
Astruc, J., 113. 
Athens, 7, 49, 50 n., 82, 135, n., 143 sqq., 

182 sqq., 198, 214, 2i6 n., 264, 305 n. 
Attalus, 50 n. 

Atthides, 125, 187 n., 188 n. 
Atticus, T. Pomponius, 238, n., 239. 
Augustine, St., 105, 112, n., 220, 237, 239,313, 

322 sqq., 327 sq. ; (Confessions of), 105, 313 ; 

(The City of God), 313, 323. 
Augustus. {See Caesar.) 

Babylon, 2, 12 n., 16, 32 n., 26, n., 29, 37 sq., 
41 sqq., 66 sqq., 81, 93, 95, 100, 102, 126, 139, 
134, 146 sq., 154 sq., 188, 225 n. 

Beaufort, L. de, 217 n. 

Behistun, 74 sq. 

Bergson, H., 317, 333- 

Berossos, 66 n., 76 sqq., 126. 

Beth-Omri, 100. 

Bible, 13, n., 32 n., 54, n., 79 n., 80 sqq., 90 sqq., 
loi sqq., 113, 155, 160, 291 sq., 295, 298, 302, 
30S1 325; Christian, 112; Hebrew, 102, 
III, 112, n.; Greek, in sq., 121. 

Biography, 5 sq., 104, 146, 180, 209, 259, 273 
sqq., 279, 312, 315, (Autobiography), 239. 

Bossier, G., 259, 268 n., 274. 

Bossuet, 298, 324. 

Botsford, G. W., 129 n. 

Breasted, J. H., 9, 46, 60 sq. 

Buckle, H. T., 330 sqq. 

Brutus, M. Junius, 192 n., 238, 348. 

Bury, J. B., 179 n. 

Cadmus, 124, 137, n. 

CsEsar, C. Julius, 49, n., 184, 227 n., 238. 

Csesar Octavianus, C. Julius, (Augustus), 49, 
121 n., 208, 219, 221, n., 230, 241, 248, 251, 
269. 

Calendar, 22 n., 27, 38, 40 sqq., 48, 56 n., 
141 sq., 170 sq., 229 sq; Egyptian, 45 sqq.; 
Greek farming, 49 ; Lunar, 44, 47 sq. ; Ro- 
man, 43, 48 sq., 227. 

Callisthenes, 214. 

Callius, 125. 



33S 



33^ 



INDEX 



Canon, of Old Testament, 104 n., 109; of 
Ptolemy, 45 sq.; of Scriptures, 114. 

Carlyle, T., i, 8, 24. 

Carthage, 192 sqq., 232, 263. 

Cassius Dio Coccejanus. {See Dion Cassius.) 

Cassius Longinus, C, 248. 

Castor of Rhodes, 207 n., 301 n., 305 n. 

Cato, M. Porcius, 213, 231 sqq., 23s sq., 243, 
244 n. 

Catulus, Q. Lutatius, 213. 

Celsus, 280, 294 sqq. 

Censorinus, 46. 

Christianity, 114, 279, n., 280, 282, 285, 287, 
289, 290 n., 293 sq., 296, 310, 321 sqq., 328. 

Chronicle, 38 sq., 59, 70 sqq., loi sq., 207 n., 
219, 238 n., 301, 306. 

Chronicles, Book of, 83 n., 84 n., loi sq., 104, 
no n., 

Chronology, 27, 40, 45, 47 sq., 123, 141 sqq., 
170, 174, 185, 187 n., 284 n., 287 sq., 298, 
301 sq., 307 ; Biblical, 98, 305 ; Chaldsean, 
305; Christian, 63, 207 n., 298, 301, n. ; 
Egyptian, 45, n. sqq., 54, 56 n., 76 ; Greek, 
49 sq., 187, 207 n., 305 ; Roman, 244, 305. 

Cicero, M. Tullius, 24, 35, 180, 185, 186 n., 
200, 206, 211 sqq., 215 sq., 219, 221 n., 
225 sqq., 331 sqq. ; (Brutus), 186 n., 215 sqq., 
225, 232 sq. ; {De Oratore), i86 n., 212 sqq. ; 
{On the Nature of the Gods), 320. 

Cnossus, 128 sq., 170. 

Codex, 34, n. sq., 187. 

Commentarii Pontijicum, 227. 

Constantine, 303 sq., 308, 311 sq. 

Constitution of Athens, 188 n. 

Corinth, 159, 189, 194, n. 

Comford, F. M., 174 sq. 

Crassus, L. Licinius, 212. 

Cratippus, 186 n. 

Crete, 13 n., 128, 134, 283. 

Croesus, 136, 147, 150, 159. 

Ctesius of Cnidus, 76. 

Cuneiform, 13, 66, 74 sq., loi. 

Cycle, 56 n. ; Astronomical, Luni-solar, 19- 
year, 48; 8-year, 48; of the Olympiad, 
49 sq.; Sothic, 47. 

Daniel, Book of, 83 n., 84 n., no, n. 

Dante, 23, 145, 220 sq., 324. 

Darius, 74 n., 75 n., 134, 147 sqq., 153, 158 n., 

160. 
Darwin, C, 4, 292 ; {Origin of Species), 334. 
David, 79, 98 sqq., 102, 105, no, 284 n., sq., 

306. 
Decalogue, 79. 
Deists, 325, 328. 

Delphi, Oracle of Apollo, 83, 159. 
Demosthenes, 183. 
Descartes, 175, 212. 
Deuteronomist, 92 sq., 96, 98. 
Deuteronomy, Book of, 83 n., 92, 96 n., 97 n. 
Diaspora, 117, 188, 290, 301. 



Diodorus Siculus, 49 n., 76 n., 185 n., 187 n., 

207 sqq. 
Dion Cassius, 209, 211, 275. 
Dionysius of Halicamassus, 14a n., 195 n., 

208. 
Diptych, 30 n. 

Easter, 44. 

Ecclesiastes, Book of, 84 n., no n. 

Ecclesiasticus, Book of. {See Proverbs. . . .) 

Economics, 170, 173, 183, 315, 321, 323, 329, 
332 ^99- 

Egypt, 2, 9, 12 n., 26 n., 28 sqq., 37, 42 sq., 
46 sq., 49 sqq., 79 sqq., 90, 95, n7, 124, 126, 
134, 136, 139, sq., 146 sqq., 153 sqq., 204, 
207, 225 n., 259, 262 n., 285, 29s n., 
306. 

Egyptologists, 46, 55, n., 56, n., 59, 63, n. 

Elohist, 89 sqq. 

Ennius, 219, 229 n. 

Ephorus, 125, 128, 185 sqq., 214, 239. 

Epic, 6, 10, 17, 23 sq., 27, 69, 129, 133, 204, 
300; Babylonian, 9, 69; Christian, 9; 
Greek, 9; Homeric, 69, 129, 183, 317; 
Minoan, 128; Vergilian, 237. 

Epictetus, 209. 

Epigraphy, 29 n. 

Eratosthenes, 50, n., 206, 207 n. 

Eschatology, 284 n. 

Esther, Book of, 84 n., no n. sq. 

Eumenes II, 34. 

Eusebius, 50 n., 63, 76 n., sqq., 130 n., 142, 
207 n., 248, 284 n., 292, 297 n., 300 n., 
302 sqq.; {The Chronicle), 76 n., 130 n., 
304 sqq.; {The Ecclesiastical History), 304, 
308 sqq. ; {The Life of Constantine), 311 sqq. 

Exodus, Book of, 83 n. 

Ezekiel. Book of, 83 n., 92 n., 104 n., 108. 

Ezra, Book of, 83 n. sq., 102 sqq., 1 10 n. 

Fabia, P., 269 n. 

Fabii, 219, 231, 257- 

Fabius Pictor, Q., 196, 213, 219, 230 sq., 235, 

253- 
Fasti Calendares, 227, 229. 
Fasti Consulares, 227, 230. 
Fasti Triumphales, 230, n. 
Feuerbach, L. A., 329, 331. 
Folk-lore, 23, 25 sqq., 87 n., 97 n., 130. 
Fortunatus, Venantius, 30 n. 
Fowler, W. W., 217. 
Froissart, 94. 
Froude, J. A., 8. 

Galileo, 324, 334. 

Gellius, Aulus, 229 n., 232, 275. 

Gemara, 115, n. 

Genealogy, 26, 38 sq., 80, 94, n., 103 a, 

137 sqq., 142, IS9, 300. 
Genesis, Book of, 68, 80, 83 n., 86, 88, 94 n., 95, 

100, n9, 155, 283 n., 292, 302, 318. 



INDEX 



337 



Geography, 40, 136 sg., 139 sqq., 143, 150, 
159, 181, 198, 206 sq., 244, 252, 255. 

Georgius Syncellus, 46 n., 50 n., 305 n. 

Germania, 258, 261, 266 n. 

Gibbon, E., 8, 276, 308, 326. 

Gilgamesh, 69, 156. 

Gnosticism, 293. 

Greece, 2, 6, 7 n., 9, 25 n, 31 sq., 34, 41, 43, 45, 
47 sgq., 73 sq., 75, 78, 82 sq., 95, 117 sq., 
120 sqq., 124 sqq., 128 sqq., 138 sqq., 142 sq., 
145, n., JOT., 153 sqq., 160, 163 jg., 166 sq., 
170 sqq., 175 sq., 179 sqq., 191 sqq., ig7 sq., 
200 jg., 202 sq., 205 jgg-, 212 sqq., 221, 
231 59., 264, 266, 278, 287, 291 sq., 294, 
297, n., 300 sq., 30s sq., 318 fj., 322, 328, 

333- 
Gregory of Tours, 94, 261. 
Grimm, J. L., 25 n. 
Grimm, W., 25 n. 

Hagiographa, 109, 115 n. 

Halicamassus, 7 n., 142 n., sq., 144 sqq., 160, 
19s n., 208. 

Hammurabi, 66, 70, n. 

Hecatseus of Miletus, 10, 47, 55 n., 76 n., 
137 sqq., 146, 154. 

Hegel, G. W., 94, 327 sq., 330 sqq., 334. 

Hellanicus, 125, 142, n., 170, 187 n., 213. 

Eellenica, 181 sq., 186, n. 

Hera, List of priestesses of, 49, 142. 

Heracleitus, 293. 

Herder, J. G., 25 n. 

Herodotus, 2, 7 sqq., 12, 32, 34, 37, 47, 49 n., 
62 sqq., 76, n., 82, 88 sq., 95, 117, 121, 
129, 133, 137, n., 139 sqq., 144 sqq., 149 sqq., 
160, 162 sqq., 166 sqq., 171 sq., 176 sq., 179, 
182, 191, 198 sq., 207 sq., 214, 219, 248, 250 
sq., 2S7. 266 n., 276, 278, 285, 297, 302, 306 
sq., 311, 314; {The History), 147. 

Hesiod, 43, 49, 82, 125, 131 sq., 135, 137. 

Hexapla, 112 n. 

Hexateuch, 83 n., 86, 96, 108. 

Hieroglyphs, 13 sq., 28 sq., 36, 38, S3, 56 sq., 
60 n. 

Historiography, 2, 156, 184, 286, 288, 300; 
Antique, 103, 123, 177, 203, 206, 250, 270, 
276; Christian, 54 n., 282, 288, 289, 292, 
296, 301, 308; Greek, 123, 129 n., 152 n., 
202 sq., 210, 213 ; Hebrew, 63, 86, 100, 103, 
106, 126; Roman, 213, 218 n., 229, 236, 239. 

History, Ancient, 36, 113; Antique, 166, 170, 
276, 289; Anthropological, 16; Argolic, 
125; Babylonian, 170; Biblical, 298; as 
branch of literature, i, 7, 52 ; Christian, 
289 sq., 296, 298, 302 sqq. ; Church, 290, 
302, 304; of Civilization, 134, 205; Con- 
stitutional, 173; Comparative, 287; Con- 
temporary, 163, 205, 276; Cultural, 173; 
Definition of, 195 sq.; Divine, 58; Eco- 
nomic, 59; of Egypt, 52, 62 sqq., 170; of 
Geography, 206; Greek, 49 n. sq., 128, 133, 



159, 179, 182, 20s sq., 253 n. ; Hebrew, Jew- 
ish, 81, 90, 97 n., loi sq., io6 sq., 116, 120, 
123, 289 n., 290 n., 298; Interpretation of, 
100, 315 sqq. ; (Allegorical), 287 ; (Antique), 
322; (Economic, Materialistic), 173, 329 
sqq.; (Historical), 334; (Mythological), 
317 sqq., 332; (Philosophical), 320 sq., 
326 sqq., 332; (Theological), 322 sqq., 332; 
of Israel, 113, 292; Latin, 276; Legendary, 
24; Meaning of, 2 sqq., 136; Mediaevjil, 
36; Modem, 163; "Natural," 4; of XIX 
Century, 183; Oriental, 253 n.; Origins, 
10 sq.; Pagan, 296; Persian, 179; Philoso- 
phy of, 132, 197, 221; of Philosophy, 203; 
Pragmatic, 201 ; Pre-Christian, 286 ; Pre- 
historic, II, 12 sqq.; Political, 133, 172, 
179 n. ; Profane, 305 ; Roman, 209, 217, n., 
219, 225 sq., 264, 276; Sacred, 305 ; Science 
of, 169; Scientific, 260, 281; Sicilian, 125; 
Universal, 179, 199, 238 sq., 255, 299, 305. 

Homer, 2, 17 sq., 23, 25, n., 33, 128 sqq., 137, 
139, 140 sq., 14s, n., 183, 218 sqq., 284, 312, 
317, 320. 

Horace. {See Horatius Flaccus, Q.) 

Horatius Flaccus, Q., 248. 

Hosea, Book of, 91, 92 n. 

Hume, D., 326, 334. 

Ihne, W., 218 n. 

Iliad, 82, 129 n., 131, 135. 

Inscriptions, 13 sq., 29, 37 sq., 51 sq., 157, 

226 n., 231; Assyrian, 72, 74 sq., 100; 

Babylonian, 71 sq.; Behistun {see Persian) ; 

Cuneiform, 66, 74, loi ; Egyptian, 31, 52, 

61 sq. ; (Palermo Stone), 55 sqq. ; Greek, 

170, 226 n. ; Persian (Behistun), 74, n., 

75, n. 
Interpretation of History. {See History, 

Interpretation of.) 
Ionia, 6 sq., 41, 133, 135, 139, 144, 146 sqq., 

150, 278, 281. 
Isocrates, 182, 185 sqq., 203, 214, 231, 234, 252. 
Israel, 81, 83, n., 90, 94, 99, loi sq., 104 n., 107, 

113, 285, 292, 298. 

Jahvist, 88 sqq. 

Jamnia, no n. 

Jeremiah, 283 n. ; Book of, 83 n., 104. 

Jerome, St., 50 n., in sq., 221 n., 279 n., 

291 sq., 304 n., 305 sqq. 
Jews, 7, n., 44, 67, 79 sq., 83, 95, 102 sqq., 108, 

no sq., IIS, 117 ^<?-, 120 sqq., 157, 221, 279, 

282, 284, 285. 
Job, Book of, 84 n., no n. 
Josephus, 63 sq., 76 n., 78, 83 n., 103 n., no n., 

Ill, 114, 119 sqq., 208, 287 n., 302; 

{Against Apion), no n., 120, 123; {The 

Antiquities of the Jews), i2osqq. ; {The Wars 

of the Jews), 120 sq. 
Joshua, Book of, 83 n., 86, 96 sqq., 104, no n. 
Journalism, 28, 38, 136, 180 sq., 183, 205, 264. 



338 



INDEX 



Judges, Book of, 83, 97 sqq., 100, 104, no n. 

Judith, Book of, in sq. 

Julius Africanus, 50 n., 63, 284 n., 300 n., sq., 

30s n. 
Julius Caesar. {See Csesar.) 
Junianus Justinus, M., 239. 
Justin Martyr, 130 n. 
Justus of Tiberius, 301. 

Kant, I., 326, 328, 334. 
Kamak, 54, n. 

Kings, Book of, 83, 86, 88, 93 n., 98, loi sq., 
104, no n. 

Lamentations, Book of, 84 n., no n. 
Law, 108 sqq., 117. {See Pentateuch.) 
Legend, 2, 6, 17, 22 sqq., 54, 86 sq., 90, 93, 95, 

97, n., 100, 102, n., 106, in, 129, 137, 163, 

217, 219, 225, 298, 30I. 
Leviticus, Book of, 83 n. 
Libraries, 28 sq., 33 n., 71, 183, 187, 238; 

Alexandrian, 32 sq., 50, 64, 205 ; Assyrian, 

31,69,74; at Jerusalem, 311; Mediaeval, 

118 n. ; of Pamphilus, 303 ; at Pergamum, 34. 
Libri Lintei, 230. 
Lihri Magistratuum, 230. 
Libri Pontificum, 277. 
Livius, T., I sq., 184, 191, 205, 208 sq., 211, 

21S, 217, 219, 227, 229 n., 231, 234, n., 239, 

243, 247 sqq., 262 sq., 269, 278, 284, 320; 

{Ah Urbe Condita), 249, 251. 
Livy. {See Livius, T.) 
Logographer, 136 sq., 140 sqq., 159, 163, 301 

sq., 320. 
Logos, 109 n., 136, 149, 153, 157, 250, 293. 
Lucretius Cams, T., 23, 220 sqq., 237, 321 ; 

{De Rerum Nalura), 220 sq. 
LucuUus, L. Licinius, 240. 

Macan, R. W., 149, 158 n. 
Macaulay, T. B., 8, 154, 175, 186. 
Maccabees, no, 115 ; Book of, 105, 112. 
Macer, C. Licinius, 234. 
Machiavelli, 255, 334. 
Malthus, T. R., 333. 
Manetho, 62 sqq., 76 n., 126, 302. 
Marx, K., 331 sqq. 
Meton, 48. 
Meyer, E., 46, 167. 
Michelet, J., 8. 

Middle Ages, 21, 33 n., 35, 46 n., 53 n., 146 n., 
202, 211, 239, 247 n., 253, 275, 298, 312, 

333- 
Millenniimi, 283, n., 284 n. 
Minoan Era, Period, 13 n., 128, 129 n. ; Life, 

129 n.; Script, 129. 
Mishnah, 115. 

Mommsen, T., 218 n., 262 n. 
Moses, 79, 83, 87 sq., 90, 93 sq., 96, 99 n., 108, 

114, IIS n., 118, 122, 130, 287, 293, 29s, 

297 n., 301, 30S, 313. 



Myth, 10, 16 sqq., 54, 67, 69, 76 sqq., 87 sq., 

91, 95, no n., 130, 133, 135, 138, 163, 185, 
217, 220 sqq., 226 n., 231, 300, 317 sqq. 

Nabonassar, 45, 76; Era of, 45, n. 

Naevius, Cn., 219. 

Nehemiah, Book of, 83 n., 84, n., 93 n., 94 n., 

102 sqq., no n. 
Nepos, Cornelius, 231, 238, n., 248 n. 
New Testament, 83 n., 112 n., 114 sq., 289, 

292 sq. 
Nicholas of Damascus, 120, n., 121 n., 208. 
Niebuhr, B. G., 212, 217 n., 247. 
Numa, Calendar of, 43. 

Octaeteris, 48. 

Odyssey, 129 n., 131, 218. 

Ogygos. 142. 

Old Testament, 12, 21, 54 sq., 80 sq., 88 sq., 

92, 98, 104 sq., 108, no sqq., 114, 116, 121, 
130, 176, 188, 285, 287, 289 sq., 294, 298, 
301- 

Olympiad, 50, 193, 307. 

Omri, 100. 

Orations, in History. {See Speeches.) 

Oratory, 176 sq., 183 sqq., 211, 213 sqq., 231, 

238. 
Origen, 112, 118, 284 n., 291 sqq., 30a sqq., 

307,313- 
Orosius, 239, 328. 
Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 186 n. 

Pais, E., 218 n. 

Palaeography, 29 n., 36. 

Palermo Stone, 55 sqq. 

Pamphilus of Caesarea, 303 sq., 311 sq. 

Panodorus, 45 n. 

Papyrus, 29, 31 sqq., 81 n., 170, 186, 204 sq.; 

Harris, 53 n. ; Oxyrhynchus, 186 n. ; Teb- 

tunis, 62 n. ; Turin, 63 n. 
Parchment, 31, 33 sqq., 204. 
Paul, St., 281 sq., 286, 293, 32a. 
Paulus, L. ./Emilius, 192. 
Pelham, H. F., 251, 255. 
Pentateuch, 79, 83 n., 86 sqq., 96, 100 n., 104, 

106, III n., 118, n., 155. 
Pergamum, 34, 50 n., 204. 
Pericles, 8, 32, 133, 146, 165, 167, 2$^. 
Peter, H., 192 n. 
Pherecydes, 124, 213. 
Philistus, 125, 214, 232. 
Philo Judaeus, 83 n., 117 sqq., 291 sq. 
Philocorus, 188 n. 

Philology, 25 n., 113, 130, 236, 253, 306. 
Philosophy, i, 2, 5, 7, 24, loi n., 118, 120 n., 

123, 138 sq., 179 sqq., 188, 195 sqq., 203, 

205, 207, 212, 215, 221, 264, 285, 290 sqq., 

302, 315, 320 sqq., 327, 329, 333. 
Photius, 185. 
Plato, 17, 82, 130 n., 181, 183, 203 sq., 264, 

295. 297 n. 



INDEX 



339 



Plautus, T. Maccius, 230. 

Plinius Secundus, C, 236, 260 n. 

Plinius Caecilius Secundus, C, 258 sq., 274. 

Pliny . (See Plinius .) 

Plutarch, 207 sqg., 240, 273, 27g. 

Poetry, 6, 23 sqq., no, 116, 132, 142, 169, 174, 

176 sq., 179, 183, 204, 217 sq., 220 sqq., 

22s sq., 285. 
Polybius, 7, 121, 127, 136, 182, 185, 187, 

191 sqq., 211, 216 sq., 231, 235, 243 sq., 250, 

253. n-. 255, 278, 284 sq., 303, 320 sq., 323. 
Ponlifex Maximus, 30, 226, 228, 232, 234. 
Pompeius Magnus, Cn., p. 240. 
Pompey. {See Pompeius Magnus, Cn.) 
Porphyry, 141 n., 297 n. 
Posidonius, 203 n., 206 sq. 
Prehistory, 12 sqq., 19. 
Prophecy, 83, 108 sqq., 114 sq., 117. 
Proverbs, Book of, 84, n., no n., in; of 

Ben Sira, in sq. 
Psahns, Book of, 79, 84, n., 88, no n., 283 n., 

293- 
Ptolemy (Ptolemaeus, Claudius), Canon of, 

45, 46 n. 
Ptolemy I, 32. 
Ptolemy II, 32 n. 
Ptolemy VI, 34. 
Punt, 22 n., 62 n. 
Pyramid Texts, 67. 

Quadrigarius, Q. Claudius, 234, n. 
Quintilian. {See Quintilianus, M. Fabius.) 
Quintilianus, M. Fabius, 252. 

Ranke, L. von, 80, 175, 200, 326 sq. 

Rawlinson, Sir H., 75. 

Regia, 30, 226 sqq., 232. 

Rhetoricians, 177, 179, 182 sqq., 203, 206 sqq., 
214 sqq., 232, 244, 276. 

Rome, 2, 21, 25, n., 30 sq., 41, 43, 48 sqq., 82, 
120 sq., 127, 135, IS5, 164, 175, 179, 184, 
187 n., 191 sqq., 197 sq., 200, 205 sq., 
208 sqq., 211 sqq., 217 sqq., 225 sqq., 236, 
239 sqq., 247 sqq., 251 sqq., 257, 259, 261, 
263 sqq., 270, 275 sq., 278 sq., 306 sq., 316, 
323, 325, 328. 

Rosetta Stone, 75. 

Ruth, Book of, 84 n., 88 n., no n. 

Saga, 129, 131 sq. 

Sakkara, 54, n. 

Sallust. {See Sallustius Crispus, C.) 

Sallustius Crispus, C, 211, 215, 235, 239, 
241 sqq., 248, 250, 308. 

Samuel, Book of, 83, 98 sq., 100, n., 104, no n. 

Scaevola, P. Mucins, 213, n., 228, 234. 

Scaliger, J., 305 n., 306 n. 

Scipio, 192, 211, 231. 

Scipio Aemilianus Af ricanus Minor, P. Corne- 
lius, 189, 192, 195, 198. 

Scipio Africanus Maior, P. Cornelius, 219, 234. 

Scrip tores Historia Augusta, 275. 



Septuagint, 112, 121, 191. 

Servius Maurus Honoratus, 227 sqq. 

Severus, Sulpicius, 298. 

Sisenna, L. CorneHus, 234, 245 n. 

Socrates, 175, 181 sq., 204, 214. 

Speeches, 213, 216; in Caesar, 184; in Cato, 
231; in Ephorus, 185; in Hellenica . . ., 
186 n. ; in Herodotus, 159 sq.; in Livy, 
184, 252 sq. ; in Thucydides, 167 ; 172, 
175 sq., 184, 186 n. 

Strabo, 185 n., 203 n., 206 sq. 

Suetonius Ttanquillus, C, 211, 273 sqq. 

Suidas, 146 n. 

SymboUsm. {See Allegory.) 

Symmachus, 112 n., 291. 

Syncellus. {See Georgius Syncellus.) 

Taboo, 27, 37, 41, 43, 94, 98, 109. 

Tacitus, C. Cornelius, 2, 121 sq., 191, 209, 
211 sq., 215, 226 sq., 229, n., 243, 257 sqq., 
273 SQ-, 276, 278 sq., 308; {The Annals), 
229, 259, 264, 276; {Germania), 258; {The 
Histories), 258, 264, 267, 276; {The Life 
of Agricola), 258. 

Taine, H., 248. 

Talmud, Babylonian, 114 sq., 284 n.; Jeru- 
salem, 115. 

Tatian, 287 n. 

Tertullian, 311. 

Theagenes of Rhegium, 290. 

Theodotian, 112 n., 291. 

Theopompus, 186 sqq., 214, 233, n., 239. 

Thucydides, i, 8, 23, 33, 49, 92, 125, 141 sq., 
157, 160, 162 sqq., 184, 186, n., 191, 195 n., 
199, 212, 214 sq., 233 sqq., 240, 243 sq., 257, 
264, 278, 284, 306, 321 ; {History of thePelo- 
ponnesian War), 166. 

Timaeus, 50, 125, 187, n., 198, 201, 206, 214. 

Tobit, Book of, 112. 

Treitschke, H. von, 186. 

Trogus, Pompeius, 239. 

Valerius Antias, Q., 234, n. 

Varro, M. Terentius, 34, 236 sqq., 253, 273, 

292, 306. 
Vergil. {See Vergilius Maro, P.) 
Vergilius Maro, P., 54 n., 211, 218 sqq., 224, 

227, 229, n., 237, 248. 
Verrius Flaccus, M., 229 n. 
Voltaire, 138, 319, 321, 324 sqq., 334. 

Wells, H. G., 238 sq. 
Wisdom, Book of, in sq. 
Wissowa, G., 217. 
Wolf, F. A., 130 n. 

Writing, 14, n.. Chap. Ill, 102 ; Socrates on 
the invention of, 204. 

Xenophanes, 135, 138. 

Xenophon, 73, 163 n., 179 sqq., 182, 184, 
186 n., 214 sq.; {Anabasis), 180 sq.; {Hel- 
lenica), 181 sq.; {Memorabilia), 181. 



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